CHARLES S. MAIER peoples, and turned on each other in unparalleled wars. They had experimented with revolutionary parties whose members were intoxicated by visions of transformation through violence and had virtually worshipped the most brutal of leaders. And finally they had sought normalcy and a precarious equilibrium with the ever more powerful forces of the economy. Of course, states were the inherited creations of individuals, communities, and parties infused by ideas, interests, and perhaps even instincts. They acted through policies and instrumentalities that they could not fully control. We can work to diminish their constraints or their tutelage. But the needs and ambitions that created them will remain in some hands or others, and certain questions will not disappear—not only Hobbes's question: What is life like without the state? But also Aristotle's question: Do we control the state by the one, the many, or the few? Or the question posed by the American founders: How do we run it for the welfare of us all? These issues abide. ■[two]- Empires and the Reach of the Global Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton Introduction BETWEEN 1870 and 1945 the violent growth of imperial regimes and the fierce struggles against colonialism that unfolded in many places repeatedly redrew the world map, both literally and metaphorically. Frantic scrambles for land and resources, colonial wars, and sustained campaigns of imperial pacification resulted in the proliferation and growth of imperial systems throughout the period: by the 1930s, almost 85 percent of the world's territory either was part of an imperial system or, as in the case of much of Latin America, had formerly been European colonial holdings.1 Empires were powerful agents that played a key role in determining the differential material conditions, social opportunities, and cultural capacities of various human communities. Even those states and social collectives that were able to deflect this imperial onrush or that successfully cast off colonial rule were not untouched by empire: they frequently faced diplomatic and economic pressure as imperial powers worked hard to "open" them up to the pull of international trade and global markets. In this period, imperial statesman and colonial administrators had considerable power to redefine the boundaries of their empires and to inscribe national borders. These powers were most famously exercised in the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, which created new regulations for European trade in Africa and formally defined European territorial holdings and spheres of influence in that continent. By the end of the nineteenth century, Liberia and Abyssinia were the only African states that were not claimed by a European state. Even if the precisely drawn maps of European imperial powers did not always translate to real colonial power on the ground, they are potent reminders of how the dynamic of empire building reconstructed worldviews and geopolitical realities. European empires created a kind of "cartographic imagination" that was central in the emergence of how the domain of "the global" was understood during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 { 185 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL In this chapter we examine some of the ways in which empires shaped and reshaped global cultural formations. But rather than offering a simple story of the growth and decline of the imperial systems constructed by European natio -states like Great Britain, France, and Germany, we seek to reframe imperial histoi. as a—partially, fitfully, and at times imperfectly—global history. We explore the spatial logics of modern imperial systems, trace the forms of interconnectcdnc-*, they produced, and highlight the fundamentally uneven character of the soci. economic, cultural, and political configurations they enabled.3 Capturing the scale, proportionality, and meaning of these imperial transformations remain, one of the most challenging tasks facing historians invested in reconstructi ns the operation of colonial power and specifying the reach of globalizing processes. Doing so requires not just that we reckon with the global dimension ■ if empires—and their globalizing effects—but that we also address the limits of their territorial reach and remain wary of European assertions of cultural exec ->-tionalism as well. For although European empires claimed the greatest share of territory and resources, imperial aspirations and the fruits of colonialism were widely shared in the decades either side of 1900: after all, the Qajar, Ottoman, and Qing empires persisted into the early twentieth century, japan built ah: extensive territorial empire in Asia and the Pacific between 1905 and 1945, and the United States, Australia, and New Zealand—all offshoots of British imperialism—set about building empires of their own. The period under consideration was, of course, one in which the world's empires underwent rapid expansion and contraction. It was an extended moment, in other words, during which imperial power was recalibrated, with significant consequences for the character and scope of the global. The expansive territorial empires that had shaped Eurasia for centuries were hollowed out in this period. The Ottoman Empire, which was founded at the close of the thirteenth century, CE, lost key European territories in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-^ 1878 and relinquished Libya after the Italo-Turkish War (1911-1912). When the Ottomans joined the Central Powers at the outbreak of World War I, Britain1 further undercut Ottoman power by annexing Cyprus as well as Sudan and: Egypt, where the Ottomans had exercised considerable influence during the nineteenth century. After the occupation of Istanbul by Britain and France at the end of the war, the remnants of the Ottoman Empire were partitioned and distributed, stripping the Ottomans of their extensive territorial holdings in the Arab world and creating the Republic of Turkey. During the same period the dominance of the Qajars, who had exercised authority in Persia from the close of the eighteenth century, was slowly eroded by British and Russian influence. The occupation of Persia by Russian, British, and Ottoman troops during World War I marked the end of effective Qajar rule. Farther east, Qing authority in China was increasingly shaken by internal social unrest, and the future of the empire was called directly into question after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 revealed the extent to which China's political power and military capacity had lagged behind its rivals. By 1900, Qing authorities were under great pressure from a range of imperial powers who sought unfettered access to Chinese markets: in that year the Empress Dowager Cixi supported the Boxer Rebellion, which targeted violence against European missionaries and Chinese Christian converts as it attempted to expel "foreign devils" from China and fortify traditional authority. The defeat of the Boxer forces by the army of the Eight-Nation Alliance (Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) was a clear sign of China's growing vulnerability, Against the backdrop of prolonged political instability and natural disasters, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 dismantled the Qing Empire, creating a new Republic of China. While these land-based empires declined sharply, the authority of the Russian Empire was relatively stable until 1917, and in the wake of the revolution of that year, Soviet empire building attempted to fortify Moscow's imperial hold on Central Asia. Generally speaking, Russia had a firm grip on the lands it had long exercised its control over in the west and south—including the eastern half of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Finland, Armenia, and Georgia. These areas were integral to the overall functioning of the empire: Ukraine, for example, provided the empire with the bulk of its wheat. These imperial regions not only provided valuable resources, they were also subject to sustained campaigns of Russification, built around policies that actively suppressed regional languages and local cultures. Under tsarist rule, Russian authority in Central Asia was consolidated through large-scale schemes where Russian colonists were encouraged to migrate to the frontiers of the empire and "settle," enacting social change through the sheer force of numbers and the transplantation of Russian culture ■[ zS6 ]■ •[ 187 ]■ TONY BALLANTVNi: 4KD AK'I'OIN'LT'I 1'. IH'IiTÜN EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Tekke tribespeople and Russians standingnear the Trans-Caspian Railway in Turkmenistan, October: 1918. The railway, the construction of which began in 1879, facilitated both the deployment of Russian military resources and the export of large amounts of cotton from Central Asia to Russia. It}-was a vital element of imperial infrastructure that helped reshape the economic, political, and cul tural terrain of Central Asia. {© Maynard Owen Williams/National Geographic Society/ Ccrbis) to the steppes. Although these Cencral Asian lands were firmly locked into, and consistently provided vital resources and markets for, the Russian economy, nationalist movements and uprisings openly challenged both Russian and Soviet authority. Western European nations were particularly prominent in the global race for ; colonies in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The "Scramble for Africa" saw Italy, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and, more indirectly, Belgium all claiming colonial territory in Africa in the final de-) cades of the nineteenth century. Africa—specifically Congo and Rwanda-Burundi—remained the focus of Belgian imperial activity, initially through the International African Association founded by King Leopold II to operate in the Congo; but the other European powers maintained globally ambitious empires. France, for example, was an influential imperial power in north, west, and central Africa by 1900. In the north its holdings included Algeria, Tunisia, and, after 1912., Morocco. French "West Africa was established as a federation of eight colonial territories in 1904, while French East Africa was established in 1910 as an administrational structure to control four colonial territories stretching north from the Congo River to the Sahara. French Somaliland provided a colonial foothold in the Horn of Africa, and from 1890 the empire incorporated Madagascar as a protectorate. In Asia, France retained control of its footholds in India—Pondichery and Mahe™as well as Cambodia and Cochin China, the southern third of Vietnam, which had come under French control in the 1860s. Later it added the territories of Tonkin, Annam, and Laos. In the Pacific, France exercised imperial authority over New Caledonia and French Polynesia, and it shared joint control of the New Hebrides with Britain. In the wake of "World War I, French holdings were further extended as France gained mandates over parts of the former Ottoman Empire (modern Syria and Lebanon) as well as the former German colonies of Cameroon and Togo. Great Britain had long been France's chief imperial rival on the global stage. In 1870 it already boasted an extensive maritime empire, and its colonies included India, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and the Straits Settlements, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Trinidad, Tobago, the Windward and Leeward Islands, British Honduras, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, Sierra Leone, the British Gold Coast (modern Ghana), British Guiana, the Falklands, and parts of South Africa. During the later nineteenth century, British imperial ambition was primarily focused on Africa. By 1900 it had added significant African holdings to its imperial system and consolidated some older footholds: these colonies included The Gambia, Zanzibar, British Somaliland, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Nyasaland, Nigeria, British East Africa, and Southern Rhodesia. From 18S2 Egypt had been a de facto British colonial protectorate, a status that was confirmed in 1914. In the later nineteenth century, Britain also enlarged its Asian and Pacific empire, adding Brunei, North Borneo, Sarawak, Fiji, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and the Kingdom of Tonga in 1900. During the twentieth century the empire was in constant flux. In 1902, at the end of the second South African War (Boer War), British influence was extended and consolidated ■[ 288 ]• •[ 2-89 I' TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL in South Africa, and in 1910 the Union of South Africa unified the two former independent Boer republics with the British-dominated Cape Province and Natal. As this colonial authority was cemented, Britain began to hand some Pacific protectorates and colonies over to Australia and New Zealand, British colonics that had imperial aspirations of their own. After protracted conflict, Ireland; which had been incorporated into the United Kingdom in 1801, was partitioned in 1912. Twenty-six counties made up the new independent Republic of Ireland while six counties in Ulster exercised "home rule" within the United Kingdom. At the same time, however, Britain gained influence in the Middle East as Palestine and Transjordan became British mandates under the League of Nations. By 1930, Britain controlled a vast and scattered global empire. After Germany's unification in 1871, the idea of a colonial empire became increasingly important as an indicator of Germany's national power. German colonialism was grafted onto an earlier tradition of German-speaking adventurers and companies developing commercial enterprises in West and East Africa, the Samoan Islands, and New Guinea. These provided the basis for Germany's" formal colonial holdings. During the Scramble for Africa, Germany made some prominent acquisitions, including German South West Africa, German East Africa, and German West Africa, which was subsequently split into Togoland : and Cameroon. In the Pacific, Germany's presence was built around the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline Islands, German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and Nauru, as well as German Samoa. World War I marked the end of this empire: some German colonies were seized by rivals at the outset of the war, while the remaining territories were redistributed among France, Belgium,: the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan under the provision of Article 2.2. of the Treaty of Versailles. Of course, this did not mark the end of; Germany's drive for new lands, as the rapid conquest of Europe by the armies of Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941 was energized by imperial aspirations. The German state not only wanted to access the resources of its European neighbors and rivals, but conquest was also propelled by a drive to open up Leben-sraum (living space) for Germans, who would transplant their supposedly superior language, culture, and racial stock into territories in the east that had previously been dominated by non-German peoples. Germany's ultimate defeat in 1945 not only shattered these imperial dreams, but was also central in stimulating new critical reflection on the connections between racial thought and empire building. In the 1880s Italy joined the European imperialist "club" as it gained African bridgeheads in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Its imperial dreams were then largely focused on Ethiopia, but these were initially blunted by the Italian army's humiliating defeat by Ethiopian forces in 1896. In 1911 the empire was further extended by the invasion of Libya. Under the leadership of the fascist Benito Mussolini, Italy's ambitions in Ethiopia were finally realized in 1936 and that newly acquired colony was merged with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland to form Italian East Africa. In 1939 Mussolini ordered the invasion of Albania, which was added to the empire as a protectorate. With Mussolini's deposition in 1943 and the opening of secret negotiations with the Allied command, the Italian empire began to be quickly dismantled as World War II drew to a close. Thus many European states were energetic empire builders between 1870 and 1945. Conversely, in the later nineteenth century Spain and Portugal, who drove Europe's influence forward in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were no longer dominant global powers. Even after Central and South American states claimed their independence from the Iberian powers during the first decades of the nineteenth century, though, both Spain and Portugal remained committed to empire building. In the 1860s Spain made several unsuccessful attempts to extend its imperial reach. Nevertheless, it continued to control important "New World" colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico and exercise the colonial authority it had held over Guam and the Philippines since the sixteenth century. By the close of the nineteenth century, however, the Spanish empire was in tatters as Cuba won its independence and Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were ceded to the United States after the Spanish-American War of 1898. By the early twentieth century, Spanish imperial influence was restricted to parts of northwest Africa. By 1900 the Portuguese empire was also greatly reduced in size and significance. Portugal's recognition of Brazilian independence in 182.2. had greatly eroded its global power. It retained significant footholds in Africa, with its key colonies of Portuguese West Africa and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). It also held some influence in Asia and the West Pacific, with footholds in India, in Goa, Daman, and Diu, as well as in Macao and Portuguese Timor (now the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste). The imperial decline of the Dutch, who ■[ 191 ]• EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL j\Je imperial ambition: it actively sought to extend its influence into Southeast Asia and the Pacific as well as East Asia. After its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japan launched a sustained campaign to build a maritime empire in the western Pacific. Its forces quickly captured Malaya, Singapore, and Burma. They also pushed into Borneo, Java, Sumatra, and Dutch New Guinea in search of oil and other resources. Japan established a network of landing strips, port ■>. and military outposts in Melanesia and Micronesia, hoping to secure its strategic advantage over Allied forces and open up new sites for imperial extraction to support the war effort and the Japanese economy. Ultimately, however, Allied forces clawed back these gains and Japan's hold on its recently acquired colonies proved: to be short-lived. At the end of the war Japan was also forced to relinquish control: over its more established colonial holdings in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. As this sketch of different empires suggests, the period between 1870 and; 1945 was characterized by sustained and intensive imperial activity that remapped significant portions of the globe. In the space of seventy-five years, a comparatively short time in world history, some powerful imperial orders collapsed while other regimes rapidly extended their reach and in the process created new and accelerated forms of cross-cultural exchange, extraction, and interdependence. Even as these systems induced change in existing cultural formations and crer ated new patterns of exchange and circulation, they faced a constant range of challenges, confronted resistant nationalisms, and, on many occasions, resorted to the use of force to assert colonial control. But the persistent anxieties of colonial regimes over the nature of the "native mind" and the fragility of their own power is a telling reminder that such control was never total or uncontested. In this period, it became clear that the nature and consequences of empire were; subject to open struggles and that colonized peoples could exploit the gaps in colonial structures and the contradictions within imperial orders that promised to civilize but were grounded in repression and violence.4 Just as individual colonies were always in process—subject to endless initiatives to reform, uplift, and reorder—the larger imperial systems they were part of were never fully self-contained or hermetically sealed systems. Though it was clearer to contemporaries who lived through this period than it has been to many historians of modern empires, traffic of various kinds linked empires. Migrant workers, missionaries, social reformers, highly educated professionals, and humble pilgrims, as well as money, commodities, technologies, and even diseases, moved among imperial systems. In some key domains—such as environmental science, medicine, and social policy formation—there was coordinated collaboration between empires, while complex flows of printed texts and popular cultural artifacts meant that some ideas moved easily across imperial boundaries.5 At the same time, imperial powers both aspirant and ascendant cast a watchful eye on each other, monitoring borders and boundaries, markets and military activity in ways that begin to suggest the parameters of an incipient, if anxious, imperial world order hy the 1880s. In this chapter, then, we attempt to trace this imperial globality in both its temporal and its spatial dimensions, seeing it as the interplay of multiple regimes that were simultaneously, but unevenly, distributed across the surface of the world: competing with each other for territory, sovereignty, strategic advantage, extractable resources, and cultural influence. Although the late nineteenth century has often been understood as a unique moment of imperial birth, consolidation, and hegemony (the so-called new imperialism), in fact the empires of this period did not emerge suddenly, nor were they sui generis; rather they grew out of, mimicked, and even cannibalized older imperial ways of seeing, thinking, and acting. Modern imperial regimes remained heavily dependent on the capital—both symbolic and real—that had accumulated from earlier empires, stretching from the early modern period back to the classical antecedents in Greece and especially Rome. In this sense, historians' tendency to demarcate this moment of empire building as clear and distinct tends to occlude the deep continuities of form and structure and reproduces the fiction that European empires in particular were providentially acquired during the late nineteenth century. ■[ 194 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL For students of imperialism interested in understanding how the empire and the globe came to be articulated, this exceptionalist vision has several limitations: First, it centers Europe—and England within it—at the heart of the modern imperial story. What were in fact very particular imperial histories are frequently-seen as exemplifying the history of modern empires writ large. Such a presumption fails to account for the longue duree of, say, Muslim empires, the power and durability of successive Chinese imperial dynasties, the centrality of empire building to the consolidation of Russia's vast Eurasian reach, or the potency of modern Japanese colonialism. Just as significantly, this Anglocentric reading tends to emphasize "absolute distinctions" among empires and—proceeding directly from the racial presumptions at the heart of British power—claims exceptionality for itself, if not for its American "successor."6 The limits of Anglocentric models are increasingly clear: for all its claims to hegemony among empires as well as within its own, the British Empire was not the only globalizing agent at work in this period. In fact, an imperial system like Germany's is actually more comparable to the Russian, the Ottoman, and the Austrian than to its contemporary British rival between 1870 and 1918. Placing these competing global visions in a single frame while continuing to account for the geopolitical power of British imperialism is one of the challenges of any narrative of empire and globe in this period.7 Second, the "high noon" periodization obscures the work of sub-imperial formations both within dominant empires, like the Raj in the larger project of the British Empire, or alongside them, such as the so-called Comanche Empire that had developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the borderlands of the emergent imperial system of the United States.8 These kinds of imperial formations, which by their very nature were multiethnic, sutured together various sites and communities into new forms of interdependence that cannot simply be explained through a narrative that frames the story of empires as the story of "European expansion" or the "West and the Rest." The metropole-colony binary that has organized so much writing on empires fails to illuminate the complex commercial arrangements, knowledge networks, and political affiliations that developed within and frequently spilt out of imperial systems. Simple binaries do not help us understand the movements of goods, money, and information that connected Hyderabad and Shikarpur in Sind to diasporic mer- chants who traveled within and beyond the British Empire to establish enclaves that were scattered from Kobe to Panama, Bukhara to Manila to Cairo. Nor do they help us make sense of the remittance flows and the expansive religious networks established by Sikh and Tamil migrants who moved along and across imperial transportation routes to Southeast Asia, Australasia, and beyond. These kinds of complex entanglements alert us to the complexity of imperial structures, to the multiple forms of interdependence that shaped colonial encounters on the ground in this period, and, in the case of transoceanic diaspora histories, to the impact of old global ecumenes as well.' Third, narratives that see empires and modernity as markers of European particularity, if not exceptionalism, have produced a radically simplified geography of imperial influence. They tend to presume that European imperial metro-poles were the sites of innovation and energy from which subject peoples received enlightenment and other benefits of "civilization," rather viewing them as sites that also received a range of economic, policy, and social innovations and were, in turn, made and remade by them. It is increasingly clear that the geographies of empire and modernity were entwined: that plantations, colonies, distant trading posts, and mission stations at the frontiers of empires were locations where some of the key characteristic practices, habits, and ideologies of modernity were fashioned or refined. The integrative work of imperial networks that linked frontiers to imperial centers meant that the developing global order was energized by a constant cultural traffic across modern imperial cultural landscapes—landscapes shaped by print culture, the mass production of goods and advertisements, and, of course, the steamship, the railway, and the telegraph. Citizens of the world— and those who aimed to be considered such—were becoming increasingly "at home with the empire" as imperial citizenship and modernity came to be understood as one and the same. The tensions of empire that resulted were the product of the uneasy proximities of colonizers and colonized on the ground, in the imaginative realm, and in the variegated spaces in between.10 In part because we are focusing on the temporal framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is worth underscoring that, like modernity itself, the enlarged commercial and industrial capacity that underpinned Europe's aggressive reach into the world from the 1870s was also an effect of earlier colonial moments and long imperial histories. In the German colonies—from Qingdao to ■[ 2-97 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Samoa to South West Africa—there are direct connections betweenprecolonial travelogues and ethnographies and later colonial policies. In purely economic terms, Europe's newfound ascendancy on the global economic stage in the later eighteenth century was the product of the "New World windfalls" produced by early modern empire building impulses that allowed a resource-poor Europe to escape its economic and environmental constraints.11 But the first truly global age of imperialism that emerged from the 1760s, which encompassed the Pacific Ocean as well as Africa, Asia, the Islamic world and the Americas, was not merely a precursor to later imperial "greatness."12 As Richard Drayton has so succinctly put it, "the Old World was tugged into the modern by the New." Drayton em-' phasizes that New World models of labor discipline and time measurement were; engendered by colonial plantations and transplanted to the factories of industrializing Europe.13 Like all good capitalist commodities, modern time arrived in the metropole shorn of evidence of its imperial roots but no less implicated in colonial political economies. Our understandings of empire and modernity are further complicated if wc open up our geographical ambit wider still, to recognize the persistence of Muslim empires, abiding imperial contests in key transition zones like North Africa, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia, and the centrality of the question of empire to East Asian modernities. When we factor phenomena like the Qing conquest of Central Asia—along with the spatial, economic, geopolitical, and even historio-graphical innovations and reconfigurations it entailed—into our genealogy of the period under consideration, we begin to appreciate both what taking a longer view of imperial history on a global stage can yield as well as how important it is to think beyond Europe as the measure of imperial state building around 1900. Indeed, the long-distance connections and imperial systems that have been at the heart of Central Asian history anticipated a global imperial world in ways that are only beginning to be fully appreciated and that promise to reorient the routines of researching and teaching both empire and world history.14 There is a danger of this move—one that rematerializes imperial antecedents of modern global phenomena—being simply absorbed into debates over the local and the global. To be sure, the local has to be addressed, not least because allowing particulars on the ground to be subsumed in a kind of placeless global landscape reproduces the very mechanisms of cultural erasure that imperialisms have frequently relied upon. It is also true that not all localities were firmly linked into the imperial or the global—a point that work by Africanists makes with compelling clarity. Whether we consider peanut farmers in Niumi, The Gambia, who were both linked to and at times insouciant about world markets, or the disinterest of Asante women in missionaries' attempts to impose regimes of bodily hygiene, it is clear that that global imperial regimes often failed in their attempts to encompass local communities within broad patterns of economic and cultural exchange.15 Not surprisingly, the view of empire and of globalization from Africa is distinctive for its rejection of totalizing views of both imperial power and globalization. For African historians like Frederick Cooper, the local was often already global, shaped not necessarily by transnational vectors but by long-standing and dynamic interregional influences: being only partially integrated into the "imperial global," as he argues, hardly equates with complete isolation. For anthropologists of Africa like James Ferguson, the insistence on convergence—of goods and influences, especially via "flows"—as a measure of globality also tends to perpetually and presumptively marginalize Africa, despite its regional diversity and intercontinental traffic across the millennia.1*5 Similar arguments could be made about the Pacific, a region that has largely been marginal to both international debates over globalization and world historical scholarship. This marginality reflects outsiders' understandings of both scale—Pacific islands seem small and scattered when measured by Eurasian or American standards—and geography. The vast Pacific Ocean has typically seemed like a barrier that has "isolated" the region from the main currents of world history: yet, for the peoples of Oceania, the sea instead was a highway that linked neighbors into circuits of exchange, and their visions of history are full of encounters, travel, and cultural change. In other words, connection had always been a feature of life in Oceania; the arrival of European imperial agents did not initiate cross-cultural contact, but rather violently, if incompletely, reoriented and reordered preexisting patterns of exchange and interdependence.17 In our view, these examples are useful because they remind us that "evidence" of globality is a prerequisite for incorporation into global history. In other words, the ideological presumptions of what "looks global" go a long way toward shaping who gets absorbed into the narratives of world history; but globalization is not the necessary or natural destination for all modern histories.18 If they act as •[ 2-99 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL a break on celeological interpretations of globalization, these critical postures also underscore the questions of proportionality with which we are concerned. When, where, and under what conditions was the global actually constructed by the imperial? Equally importantly, to what degree were imperial conditions themselves shaped by other nonimperial global forces? In our current moment, examples of such disarticulation may seem counterintuitive, but they nonetheless abound. Take, for example, the growing coordination of immigration restriction policy and response to the rapid extension of Chinese migrant networks across the Pacific world or the processes that ended slavery in German East Africa on the threshold of the Great War in spite of, rather than because of, colonial intervention.19 In both these cases, empire was a factor, even a historical agent, but it did not necessarily play a primary or determinative role. And if we are to assess the impact of empire on global developments, we must be careful not to ascribe the outcome of every event, idea, practice, or policy to an inevitably imperial global hegemony without attention to the kind of contingencies and ruptures to which we understand all histories to be subject. Phenomena like Chinese diasporic networks and the campaigns to end slavery depended as critically on earlier histories of empire building, long-distance trade, and global religious impulses as they did on the events and transformations of our chosen period here. As we indicated above, empires capitalized continuously on earlier connections, extending and enhancing the scale of pre-modern networks and drawing them into the circuits of the larger imperial or global systems. And here we want to suggest that the global is not some kind of preexisting category waiting to be filled or the inevitable destination of all imperial power. Rather, our task is to illustrate that empires in this period were regimes invested in creating geographically expansive markets, politically portable forms of government, and civilizational identities that aspired to interconnectedness and interdependence. During this extended historical moment, the spaces of the imperialized world came to be understood and valorized as global—a term occasionally used at the time but which nonetheless has analytical possibilities retrospectively if we are cautious about specifying its territorial remit. For sometimes the imperial global was, in fact, intercolonial, as in the manifold connections that directly linked settler colonies such as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand or the linkages that developed between India and British territo- ries in Southeast Asia as well as South and East Africa. Sometimes it was inter-imperial, as in the deep ideological continuities between British and American colonial rule; the movement of indentured workers from the New Hebrides to British-controlled colonies like Western Samoa, Queensland, and Fiji, and French colonies like Tahiti, New Caledonia, and Hawaii (both before and after its annexation); or the emergence of Pan-Asianism at the conjuncture between British and Japanese imperial orders; and even the interdependence that developed between indigenous New Caledonian activists and Australian communists. Rarely was the "imperial global" comprehensive and all-encompassing, in the sense of reaching everyone on the globe or impacting or penetrating the full scope of colonized societies. In this sense, the articulation of empire and the global marks out a particular kind of uneven development. The imperial global was less an accelerating juggernaut than a set of intermittently integrative processes that shared no single common motor, processes that reflected the vagaries of conjuncture and divergence, of appetite and indifference, of intentionality and inertia. Critical histories of the global like ours will not only be sensitive to the role of imperial power in making the global, therefore, but will also track the limits of imperial reach and the anxieties and vulnerabilities of imperial authority as well. This is not to say that we subscribe to the "fit of absence of mind" account of how empires were established; quite the contrary. We embrace, rather, the "chaotic pluralism" argument that John Darwin has nominated as a possible explanation for how Western imperialism, at any rate, achieved the hegemonies it did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^ Following the work of postcolonial critics, we adhere to the global not as an a priori category but as a positioning device: an interpretive framework that enables us to position empire in relationship to an emergent and even halting or unfinished global set of processes rather than a territorially given set of coordinates.11 This move, which draws from both feminist/queer theory and postcolonial criticism, has at least three methodological consequences. The first is to signal our skepticism about the teleology of the terrain of the global. By resisting the temptation to presume that all histories end up as global, we can better capture the historical conditions that nurtured relationships between empires and other globalizing agents without presuming a natural or even fateful affinity between the two. Its second function is to illustrate the ways in which colonial regimes •[ 301 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL and imperial systems looked very different from different points in space and < lif. 1 ferent social locations: to get outside the view from the imperial center (whethi-r % London or Istanbul, Tokyo or Paris) is to view the assemblage of global empin 1 from a variety of angles. So, for example, the operation of Ottoman authority ! was experienced very differently in Yemen or Iraq than it was in Istanbul itscl ! just as the experiences of Han Chinese and Melanesian populations color.i>vd by the Japanese had very different inflections due to the application of Japanese racial thought in its imperial domains. Thirdly, we seek to embed the study of ' imperial relations both in the very real specificities of place but also from an an- - "J gle of vision that captures the texture of the social and the cultural, not sim ply as ! lived experience but as part of the structural conditions of empire building and global connectedness. Here we are indebted to geographers who are at pains to remind us about the importance, and historical specificities, of space at all scal.u levels—from the hospital to the mission station, from the law to the body of the child, the day laborer, the rebel. We insist that these microlevel histories reveal the deep contingencies of imperial global systems and tensions of the kind produced by the collision between the weight of local difference (or indifference) and the reterritorializing nature of imperial power. Imperial histories are replete with this: from the rise of the Deo^ band school of South Asian Islam, which attempted to reorient Muslim life by reasserting cultural continuity and teaching early Islamic principles against the j backdrop of colonial modernization, to Maori prophetic leaders, who activelyk separated their followers from the trappings of modernity as they attempted to replicate the transformations enacted by the Old Testaments Abraham and Mo-' ses. Or in a place like Tianjin, China, where multiple empires had concessionary : privileges, locals who navigated the power structures understood them not as competing local or imperial or global spaces but as a matrix of all three.22 In other - ' , words, we see empires not as coherent wholes that can be recovered in their seam--: lessness, but rather as the accumulation of often incommensurate fragments that interrupt the claim to homogeneity that the global tends to promise. i The homogeneity we are writing against is enabled by imperial histories that j fail to move beyond a top-down approach and insist on genealogies of the contemporary imperial moment focusing on high politics derivative of Euro-American political thought. We are wary of imperial histories that fail to reflect the imprint of the colonized, not simply because we believe there is ample evidence to show how and why they were coauthors of imperial social, political, cultural, and economic orders, but also because of the ways in which those processes developed practices and ideas of indigenous sovereignty among native peoples with implications for resistance and decolonization on a global scale. Anticolonial nationalists in this period may not have all communicated or known each other, but the parallels between movements are as striking as the resemblances between and among imperial orders themselves. No self-respecting account of the imperial global in this period can afford to ignore or sidestep the work that critics of empire in colonial "locales" and imperial metropoles undertook, because that work actively helped to create and ultimately to unravel the old global order that pre-1945 imperial powers attempted to put and keep in place. The appropriation of technology, the reconfiguration of space and place, and the will to imagine a community of transnational anti-imperial solidarities were absolutely consequential to the fate of the global world order in this period—as events like the Treaty of Versailles, the conquest of Manchuria, and the imperial border-crossing of anticolonials like Ho Chi Minh and Subhas Chandra Bose illustrate. The importance of anticolonial nationalism also recodes our view of the nation-state, a form of political organization that, despite attempts at international governmentality like the League of Nations or at transregional political formations like the Caliphate movement, was increasingly authoritative on the global stage in this period. Instead of seeing nation-states as simply the projection of European models out into the colonial sphere, we emphasize the centrality of imperial mobility, colonial communication systems, and anticolonial nationalism in molding the shape and character of individual nation-states and the global nation-state system. At the same time, imperial economic competition compelled nation-states to define themselves increasingly as global policemen, regulating migration and controlling movement across borders with increasingly strict citizenship mechanisms, established through complex legislation and technologies like passports, visas, and identity cards. The strong nation-state was in many ways the effect of these apparatuses, which were elaborated, in turn, in the face of escalating connections: the capacity to control borders and people was the sine qua non of its definition, in both demographic and spatial terms. Nor were the leaders of anticolonial movements immune to these exigencies, as the Indian National ■[ 301 ]■ •[ 3°3 ]' TONY BALL ANT YNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OE THE GLOBAL Congress's preoccupation with expatriate Indians in South Africa and elsewhere testifies. In this sense, the models of sovereignty and territoriality that "natiu-critics" of empire elaborated revealed the growing inescapability of the nation-state as a model for political organization and the cultural imagination. In the sections that follow we seek to foreground the particular, contingent and dynamic relationships between different scales of social organization, political activity, and intellectual work in order to assess the parameters of the global in the age of empires. We are particularly interested in the ways in which forms of connection and circulation—from the operation of railway networks to international conferences, from the distribution of newspapers to the spread of diseases— trur-w multiple scales and dimensions of historical experience into bold relief. Even as w c demonstrate how these forms and pathways helped to shape the global, our anal\-sis consistently emphasizes the unevenness, fragility, and incompleteness of the •<-linkages. By proceeding thus we hope to bring the histories of connection and contention, interdependence and independence, accommodation and resistance, together within the same frame. We are convinced it is within these coexisting histories that the texture of human experience is found and that particular manifestations of modern imperial and global culture take shape. Questions of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and status, are crucial to this project, not simply because they have to be accounted for but because they were utterly instrumental to how empires unfolded. Far from being marginal to the operations of imperial geopolitics, bodily practices and intimate relations of various kinds were deeply implicated in the inequalities and power struggles of colonialism. We begin in Section I by examining modern empires as primarily, if not exclusively, territorializing projects: place-making regimes whose spatial logics had local and regional consequence and whose cultural forms (military barracks, the railway carriage, the imperial home) add up to a historically particular global model of "culture" and "civilization." In Section i we focus on the history of com-: munication, transportation, and various forms of economic connection. While these may be thought of as the staple of an older style of "imperial history," we believe that they are crucial elements for any work that seeks to unpack the relationships between empire building and the emergence of the global—not least because they were instrumental in the reseating of time and place that empires aspired to, whether European, Muslim, or Asian. Section 3 takes on the question of geopolitics, tracking the work of imperial agents and anticolonial subjects in the making of the new world order that participants in the postcolonial conference at Bandung were compelled to grapple with. Here we are interested as much in provincializing Britain in the story of modern imperialism as we are in centering the ideological and political work of empire's opponents and enemies. Such a inove entails revising conventional views of the spatial order of the period, both to account for the roles of Russia, Japan, and the United States as imperial powers and to register the ways in which anti-imperial engagement and resistance shaped the fate of the post-1945 world. It also means remaining vigilant about historicizing the fitful and uneven development of the imperial global and skeptical about its world-historical inevitability—then and now. One risk of arguing for empire asakindofGPS (Global Positioning System)— even tongue in cheek—is that we imagine that ours is the view from the historio-graphical equivalent of Google Sphere. While we have tried to educate ourselves out of the corral of British imperial spaces and places—with all the baggage that entails—ultimately we must cop to our training, our intellectual knowledge base, and the politics of our locations. The latter are admittedly "Western," though in the case of New Zealand not self-evidently so; and they are primarily Anglophone in orientation, a fact that exerts real limits on the variety of histories we can access and put into play as part of our assessment of the limits and possibilities of a global imperial order. There is no getting beyond the materiality of one's location and its impact on one's perspectives and methods; but this does not mean that there is no possibility of directing a self-critical, and critically analytical, optic toward it and proffering new forms of historical thinking and doing from there. We hereby acknowledge our errors of commission and omission as well as the limits of our analytical interpretations. We do so not out of defeatism or from a desire to avoid accountability but out of a commitment to both the project of radical critique in an age of Anglo-American imperial aggression and a genuine sense of humility about the limits of the knowable world in an age of apparently boundless globality. ■[ 304 ]■ Reterritorializing Empires HISTORICALLY, the building of empires was about the wresting of land_ whether through military might, economic encroachment, or purposeful settlement—from its traditional owners or imperial rivals and accumulating these pieces of territory in an extended economic and political system. Newly acquired lands might offer strategic advantage, access to lucrative markets, or valuable supplies of labor. They might also allow the colonizing power to exploit profitable resources or commodities as well as a taxable population. At a fundamental level, empire building was about the extraction of rent, revenue, and resources from land overtaken. The strings of colonies, protectorates, and trading enclaves built up by imperial powers between 1870 and 1945 were routinely depicted through globes, maps, and atlases. Territorial accumulation became both a symbolic and material index of national power and international standing: advocates of colonialism in recently unified nation-states of Germany and Italy as well as in Meiji Japan gave particularly strong expression to the idea rlnnr an extensive empire was a crucial indicator of a nation's strength and modernity. Thus empire building between 1870 and 1945 was grounded in acts of deter-ritorialization and reterritorialization. Put even more simply, all modern empires lived and died not just by the sword, but by territorial imperatives as well. Although this proposition may seem self-evident, it is worth dwelling on, in part because within the new political and technological orders spawned by forms of globalization at the dawn of the twenty-first century—with their supposed "flatness" or "placelessness"—the territoriality of modern imperial formations can be lost. It would be unwise, of course, to suggest that the sprawling empires of this period always had a hands-on, terra firma grasp of all their colonial possessions and subjects. It would be equally foolhardy to claim that the age of territorial empires is over: as we well know, a wide variety of raw materials remains the motivation for acts of imperial aggression large and small. Nevertheless, when viewed against contemporary networks of communication and the "virtual" nature of •[ 306 ]■ EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL much imperial power at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the ways in which imperial regimes imagined and managed the spaces of empire between 1870 and 1945 begin to look historically distinctive. This period not only witnessed the establishment and consolidation of particular forms of territorial imperialism: it also gave rise to specifically spatial idioms of imperial power that carried with them a number of ideological presumptions about the benefits of imperial rule and its civilizing capacities. Those presumptions were vulnerable to influence, appropriation, and resistance by all kinds of actors, colonized and colonizers alike. Indeed, histories of modern empires must address their spatial ambitions and aspirations in both material and symbolic terms, especially if the historical particularity of empire building between 1870 and 1945 is to be reckoned with. To be sure, the centrality of territorial acquisition, expropriation, and transformation is not unique to modern empires. From the Romans to the Mongols, from the Ottomans to the conquistadores, from Timur to Suleiman and beyond, one of the chief outcomes of the imperial impulse—whether out of religious, commercial, or political motivation—has been the acquisition of new spaces and their transformation into new places marked by the structural and cultural imprint of the new imperial power. At the most literal level, a phenomenon like the Mongol takeover of Eurasia—where powerful horses, military might, and the imposition of theyassa (legal code) allowed Genghis Khan and his successors to assert their dominance from Yangzhou to Budapest with unprecedented velocity—illustrates the sheer spatial ambition of premodern empire building, however loosely bound the collection of conquered lands ended up being. And in the wake of Genghis Khan there were more purposeful early modern articulations of imperial territoriality as well. For what are Gugong (the Ming and Qing Dynasties' "Forbidden City") or Fatehpur Sikri (Akbar's red sandstone wonder) if not epic expressions of empire's territorial reach and spatial ambition before modernity? Few, if any, modern empires built architectural equivalents to these palatial capitals—and when they did, as in the case of Edwin Luytens's New Delhi, they invariably had to accommodate the blueprints of previous imperial designs. Indeed, grafting one space upon another, whether cartographically or imaginatively or both (as Christopher Columbus infamously did when he saw Hispaniola and mistook it for "the Indies") is perhaps one of signature moves of would-be imperial powers. •[ 307 ]• TONY B ALL ANT YN E AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Indeed, the history of imperialism abounds with examples of such grafting, j3 the British appropriation of Mughal forms in India and the French rewc.hmp of Ottoman techniques in Algeria—to name just two—so powerfully suggon Beginning with Columbus's misapprehension, such examples remind us th.it colonizing powers never entered empty, history-less spaces, and they testify |., how older imperial histories have been routinely sutured into emergent colonial formations. Like those that had come before, modern imperial states understood t.:c power of mapping empire's presence in spaces large and small. Whether in Bi it-ish India or on the Russian steppe, modern empires felt an impetus to measure and map territory in ever greater detail, in order to rationalize conquest in scientific and managerial terms. Modern imperial maps and modern imperial spa, es linked spatial planning to state power more tightly than previously and by tiie middle of the nineteenth century were increasingly interested in mapping tin-spatial configurations of race, gender, and other manifestations of cultural difference. This is not to say that a deep concern with cultural difference was not-legible before the nineteenth century. World maps produced in the early modem West were routinely ornamented by images depicting connubial figures and "na-: tive" peoples in various states of dress and undress, thus marking out the overlap between the conquest of territory and the sexual imagination. And it would be hard to gainsay the ways that the Inquisition, as one territorially far-reaching example of ecclesiastical impérium, left its imprint on the bodies of victims black and brown and red, in many cases using their sexual relationships as the basis for persecution in the enclosed spaces of the torture chamber and the very public spaces of the auto-da-fé.23 But historians generally agree that the nineteenth century witnessed an acceleration of conviction about the fixity of biological race; and a concomitant concern about the dangers of intermixture, whether in social or sexual intercourse, to imperial security tout court?* At the same time, knowledge was increasingly collected and ordered to produce detailed pictures of social organization within each colony. Dictionaries and grammars of local languages, maps and city plans, censuses and collations of statistics measuring everything from trade patterns to the average height of particular populations were crucial instruments that allowed administrators to "know the country" they ruled over" Through these forms of colonial knowledge and the growing coercive power of ■[ 508 ]• modern states, empire builders attempted to keep a close watch over the intimate domain: policing these lines of connection was frequently a difficult undertaking, i [HlC nevertheless was a routine concern of many colonial regimes. The dominance of racialized notions of space in imperial policy and ambition is amply evident, for instance, in both the microprocesses and the macrodis-courses of the post-World War I period. For example, the Amritsar massacre in 1919, which left at least 379 Punjabis dead, dramatized British anxieties over the racial ordering of space in colonial cities. The mixing of villagers and politically active urbanites at Jallianwalla Bagh, a large public garden and gathering place adjacent to the precincts of the Golden Temple, caused leading British officials in Punjab considerable anxiety in the wake of an assault on a white woman and against the backdrop of widespread disruptions to imperial communication networks and rumors about the possibility of a rising against British rule. The British brigadier Reginald Dyer, who gave the order to open fire on the crowd, claimed that he was facing the seeds of an uprising, and he justified his actions as upholding an increasingly precarious imperial authority. The massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh not only laid bare the anxieties of the small cadre of British administrators who were dependent on large numbers of Indian soldiers, clerks, and minor state functionaries as they ruled over a vast Indian empire, it also quickly came to stand for the brutality that was born out of an imperial desire to exert control over the social and political lives of colonized peoples.26 To take another example from the European context, the interweaving of space, race, and empire was striking in the context of German nationalist thought. From the 1890s the German ethnographer and geographer Friedrich Ratzel argued not only that Germany should seek to extend its naval power and overseas possessions, but that Germans should also strive to fashion a strong state that would naturally expand. This expansionist drive, he argued, should extend Germany's territorial borders and spread German culture into Eastern Europe. After Ratzeľs death in 1904, the notion of Lebensraum that was central to his discussion of the growth and decay of states not only became an important element in German scholarly debate but also was woven into discussions of Germany's imperial potential. By 1933 a starkly racialized version of Lebensraum underpinned Adolf Hitler's arguments for the ruthless colonization and Germaniza-tion of Eastern Europe.17 '[ 309 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Recent research has suggested that the Nazi states weaving together of race and geography also drew upon colonial antecedents, especially from German South West Africa, Jürgen Zimmerer has demonstrated that colonial administrators in German South West Africa strove to fashion a Rassentrennung (racial division) between German colonists and Africans, primarily through the ere ation of a cheap African labor supply shorn of legal rights. The racial logic that underpinned this strategy energized a violent and genocidal war against the Her-ero and Namapeoples between 1904 and 1908, which reduced their populatioiis by at least 80 percent and 50 percent, respectively. This campaign saw colonial administrators advocating the systematic destruction of local infrastructure, the deployment of "extreme terror" in the execution of the war against both fighters and their families, and the use of "concentration camps" for prisoners. These models were significant templates for Nazi practices, as they were transported back to Europe by some young colonial administrators who later served in the Nazi state and were transmitted through scientific networks that gave racial theories produced out of colonial knowledge greater purchase within learned metropolitan circles.28 In justifying the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941^ Adolf Hitler himself explicitly invoked another set of colonial models to explain the thrust of Nazi policy: "The Russian territory is our India, and just as the English rule India with a handful of people, so will we govern this, our colonial territory. We will supply the Ukrainians with headscarves, glass chains as jewelry, and whatever else colonial peoples like." German military advances were to; redraw the demographic map of Russia and Eastern Europe and, as Hitler explained, the "German Volk [people]" were "to expand into this territory."29 These examples remind us that the global reorderings enacted by empires between 1870 and 1945 depended on a host of projects where anxieties over space and cultural difference coalesced, not only in attempts to regulate the ways in which different populations related on the ground in colonial locations but also in efforts to create and protect what was perceived as a superior metropolitan cultural order. Collaborators and enemies of imperial regimes, for their part, also understood the stakes of these spatializing projects, and they manipulated and challenged imperial power accordingly. Although it is notoriously difficult to read intentionality off of communal historical events like the gathering at Jal-lianwalla Bagh, at least some of those who gathered in that enclosed space under- stood that they were defying imperial territoriality at a time of imperial crisis. Indian nationalist leaders had long been aware of the ways in which British colonialism rested on the reordering of space along the lines of race and gender. Mohandas K. Gandhi himself had been central in the agitations against the laws that restricted the movements of nonwhite groups in South Africa and was highly cognizant of the ways in which British colonialism in South Asia rested on a raft of spatial exclusions and hierarchies that divided the British rulers from their India subjects. Even his celebrated Salt March from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi in 1930 challenged the ways in which the unequal legal edifice of colonialism rested on a spatial logic. The Salt Act of i8Sz had given the British colonial government a monopoly on the processing, distribution, and selling of salt. This legislation restricted the handling of salt to officially sanctioned salt depots in order to undercut small-scale local gathering and distribution of the commodity. By simply gathering the naturally occurring salt from the seashore at Dandi, Gandhi defied this monopoly and literally asserted the right of Indians to handle a commodity that was deeply embedded in the routines of daily life. Madhu Kishwar has observed that this campaign offered a new spatial vision of politics as it tied the kitchen to the nation, suggesting that the most basic elements of domestic life rested at the heart of the struggle against colonialism.30 The brilliance of Gandhi's salt satyagraha was that it asserted Indian autonomy while also imagining sites like the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat, which his followers marched upon following the march to Dandi, as sites of colonial domination. Gandhi's satyagraha campaigns were a potent demonstration that indigenous apprehensions of space and the persistence of native lifeways could provide the basis for challenging colonialism and, in so doing, revealed the very limits of territorial empire. This is not to discount the tremendous violence visited upon colonized peoples in the name of imperial necessity and global preeminence. But attending to the histories of imperial struggle literally on the ground reminds us of how and why the dramas of imperial encounter in this period were profoundly territorial in nature. Empire was, in other words, about the embodied uneven-ness of territorial ambition and resistance in the context of imperial systems that sought to impose their power across the globe. This section focuses on some specific cultural, political, economic, and social spaces that played a central role in the reconfigurations wrought by the particularly •[ 310 ]■ •[ 311 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL aggressive age of empire building chat emerged from 1870. After exploring some of the broad connections between space and the question of cultural differs.. e in imperial regimes, our analysis turns to the ways in which imperial milium.' activicy produced some distinctive new sites for cross-cultural engagement as well as how these armies reshaped relationships between colonized communities and their homelands. We then examine the particular importance of the eruption of space in the work of missionaries and the impact of spatial arrangement on labor regimes. This opens up a broader exploration of the symbolic and material significance of the "home" as a site for colonial transformations. Ultimately we are interested in exploring both the complex cultural traffic that brought tlu se contestations over space in the colonies back "home" to imperial metropolcs .in J the extent to which indigenous communities were able to exercise influence in these struggles over the meaning of space. Thinking about Imperial Space Drawing largely on the expertise of geographers and the theoretical apparatus provided by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, historians have developed a repertoire of terms and concepts over the last two decades that enable us to appreciate what is at stake in historicizing the spatial order of empires. Some of this terminology originated in earlier historiographies that had varying stakes in the concept of empire. The wordfrontier is a case in point. So, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis"—first delivered as a paper at a session of the American Historical Association held at the World s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and later incorporated into his 1911 book, The Frontier in Ameriam ■ffitfery—recognized the process of westward expansion and settlement as a function of "colonization" but generally emphasized the way in which the frontic r experience shaped the American republican tradition rather than the consequences of territorial conquest or interracial violence. This meant that Turner's narrative really focused on how European migrants to the United States became Americanized rather than exploring the ways in which the frontier functioned as a permeable and fluid space of cross-cultural engagement and struggle. Of course, frontier is a fraught term well beyond Turner; yet its power to conjure colonial struggles over land makes it an important imperial technology rather I than simply a spatial one. Similarly, for historians of Australia the idea of the : frontier has long been a staple metaphor for conjuring both the spatial limits of lllh" ' ''''settler colonialism and the cultural manifestations of that phenomenon (as in "frontier masculinity"), though the expressly colonial or postcolonial interpretive contexts had been muted until the work of scholars like Henry Reynolds focused attention on both the centrality of violence to colonization and strategic -forms of resistance mobilized by Aboriginal communities in the face of white encroachment.31 The same may be said for the term borderlands. Used most prominently perhaps in North American historiography, the concept of borderlands is a way of | marking the outer limits of settlement and expansion and signifying the cultur- ally mixed and heteroglot spaces that frequently developed at the boundaries of states and empires. The idea of "borderlands" also allows processes and events that transect or blur national boundaries to be historicized: whether these are the shifting formations of indigenous communities from Florida to California or the eruption of "transnational warriors" who dared to traverse and transgress -If the porous yet highly politicized border inscribed between the United States and Mexico." Although the idea of "borderlands" can undoubtedly illuminate I the development of relationships between the United States and Mexico, which I suggests that it should be key element in the reappraisal of American empire building, the concept's historiographical roots lie in early modern conquest narratives, and the imperial context of this powerfully spatial concept is not always to the fore. This may be in part because historians making use of terms likefrontier and borderland typically frame their studies within the dynamics of nation making rather than in terms of their dynamic relationship to broader imperial J systems as such. This is especially true in the case of indigenous histories that, while obviously mindful of the operations of imperial power, have tended to be as concerned with recovering elements of cultural continuity and underscoring }l the self-contained spaces of "local" life, political economy, and culture. The shift- ing deployment of terms like frontier and borderland is a salutary reminder that spatial terminology itself is no guarantor of elaborate spatial analysis. 1 In contrast, the analytical capability of terms like frontier and borderland is being brought to bear in historiographies where questions of empire and colonialism have frequently been neglected. This is most evident in current work on TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL the territoriality of the Russian and Soviet empires; indeed, of all the borderlands of empire, Central Asia has been among the least historicized, at least until recently.33 A phrase like "the Great Game," which is probably the most recognizable term for the Central Asian context, arose in the nineteenth century to describe the ongoing conflict between the tsarist and British empires over the land between British India and Russia. Mobilized first by an obscure English traveler and made famous by Rudyard Kipling's Kim, it remains a popular way of conjuring the stakes of imperial contest over vast expanses of desert and mountain, with the Khyber Pass—that winding and often fatal road between Peshawar and Kabul—serving as the most enduring symbol of Central Asian landscapes \ and communities that have proven hard to incorporate into any stable and durable", imperial order. Russo-British rivalry over this patch was understood in strateg"-cally spatial cerms, with Afghanistan routinely seen as a staging ground for Russia's invasion of India—a fear that provoked no fewer than three Anglo-Afghan wars between 1838 and 1919. But the concept of borderlands is equally apt, not only because it draws attention to the multiethnic communities that were annexed at the frontiers of Russian and then Soviet territory, but because it signifies the liminal ■ spaces through which colonized elites had to move and negotiate power with im-: perial officials. As in other imperial contexts, "these imperial borderlands ... were not incidental to Russia. Their existence—and their subjugation—helped define Russia and Russianness in very tangible ways that are lost to analysis if Russia is seen as a unitary state."34 The contingency of metropolitan imperial regimes on the so-called edges of empire—yet another profitable idiom for historicizing the space and place of imperial power—is something to which we shall return in greater depth below.35 Meanwhile, thanks in large measure to the work of environmental historians, the category of borderlands has allowed for an opening out into the larger space of "nature" more generally, thereby enabling students of colonialism to appreciate how the natural landscape (bush, forest, riverbank, swamp, and cane field) and the imperialized one (aboriginal reserve, game preserve, plantation, port, and colonial monument) helped to map local encounters even as they choreographed those encounters in the tangled histories of transnational and global spatial formations. Alfred Crosby's model of "ecological imperialism" captures some of these dynamics, emphasizing the place of biological exchanges and ecological 314 ]■ transformation in enabling imperial ambition to become territorial sovereignty, but it tends to erase the complexity of indigenous understandings and uses of the natural world prior to conquest; and it does not necessarily do justice to the complex interweaving of colonized and colonizet interests in the transformation of the landscape that frequently was the basis of imperial contest and colonial struggle.36 The systematic deforestation of Manchuria by Japanese mining and lumber companies—in the service of the interests of the imperial state—in the interwar period is just one of many examples that might be given to illustrate the ecological and economic consequences of imperial intrusion. Stories of this kind of decimation and depletion are legion, and they need to be understood as exemplars of the uneven geography of capitalist development that identified lands at the edge of imperial formations as spaces ripe for exploitation and extraction. Dramatic acts of environmental transformation were therefore not just manifestations of modernity's rapacious hunger for energy, commodities, and material wealth, but also were frequently generated by imperial ideologies that operated from the metaphorical presumption that colonial spaces and their inhabitants were wild and uncultured, waiting to be tamed. Yet especially in recent work, historians have been keen to place their narratives of environmental imperialism in the context of local, regional, and national struggles, in part so that colonial territories can be understood not simply as surfaces over which imperial power inevitably marched but as "meeting up places" in which a variety of historical subjects, in admittedly asymmetrical positions of power, nonetheless fought over the distribution of resources and over the nature of place itself.37 That tribal and aboriginal peoples had competing spatial regimes suggests too that the territorializing practices to which colonizers made recourse did not merely produce reactive spatial claims on the part of natives, but rather threw into bold relief the variety of cartographic idioms imperial officials and subjects alike mobilized in the modern age. One consequence of empire was a heightened sense of geographical identity for metropolitan imperial cultures as well as those enmeshed in the everyday struggles of colonial life at the edge of the empire. We know, for example, that by the 1S50S "the empire" and the "globe" had been stitched together in the British public's imagination because of the popularity of imperial exhibitions and widespread circulation of maps, atlases, and globes that graphically depicted the TONY BALL ANT YNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL growing reach of British territorial sovereignty and cultural influence extended by traders, settlers, and missionaries. Most Britons living between the 1890s and the end of World War II were only indirectly connected with the empire, but no doubt a sizable proportion of them knew that it was Cecil Rhodess ambition to paint the world red as a result of school geography lessons that dramatized the spatial ambition of the age. This spatial ambition was constantly reiterated in the popular visual culture that represented the empire to British people: the global span of the empire was graphically depicted on objects from tea towels to playing cards, cake tins to board games. Understanding empires as spatial and spatializing structures means that the: power of terms likefrontier, borderland, edge, and landscape resides not simply in-their capacity to illuminate corners of imperial and colonial history heretofore unheeded. They also reveal just how critical space was, as both a material and an imaginative resource, to the operation of imperial domination, both symbolic and real. Both Chinese and dogs (and bicycles) were prohibited in parks in British-controlled Shanghai, though debate over whether there was actually a sign that read "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed" has continued to fuel heated debate about the convergence between race, imperial power, and space.38 As powerful as it is, this example of imperial segregation—with its echoes of the Jim Crow South ("No Negroes Allowed"), the urban United States ("No Irish Allowed"), and-colonial Natal ("No Indians Allowed")—should not lead us to an easy equation of imperial privilege with whiteness, as this would occlude other forms of racial hierarchies internal to Asian empires and articulated through local and often confessional idioms. We can see this in the case of Zou Rong, a young Han Chinese writer educated in Japan who subsequently lived beyond the full reach of the Qing imperial authorities in a foreign concession in Shanghai. He published a tract in 1903 that was fiercely critical of the Qing Dynasty's Manchu rulers. Pie expressed his revolutionary rage in racial and spatial terms, imagining a time when China's majority Han population would "emerge from the Eighteen levels of Hell and rise to the Thirty Three Mansions of Heaven... to arrive at their zenith—revolution."39 Students, traders, migrants, and travelers across the globe gave voice to similar critiques, viewing the overthrow of racial degradation as a foundational justification for revolution against imperial oppressors, from the West and East alike. The year 1903 was also when W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, in which he addressed the problem of the "color line" that separated black and white Americans. The nearly simultaneous publication of these texts speaks to the global entanglements of race and space that were critical to both the stability of imperial rule and the energies behind resistance to it. The Military-imperial Complex Imperial garrisons remain a key element of contemporary realpolitik, and their continued existence is an important spur to a consideration of the centrality of the military in underwriting the projection of imperial authority. But their histories also remind us how empires created distinctions between native and imperial places while simultaneously encouraging indigenous communities to accept the legitimacy of these new spatial orders. Of course, armed conflict itself reordered space: imperial armies left their imprint on the landscape in manifold ways. In the wake of open conflict, the battlefield could serve as a source of imperial or anti-imperial memory, whether it was officially commemorated or not. Imperial armies and their generals may often have been ignorant of the indigenous meanings of battle sites, but those who did understand them often capitalized on them to shore up the spatial symbolism of their victory. This was certainly the intention of Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, who became viceroy of India in 1905. He set out to pay homage to the Mughal past by restoring a number of tombs and sacred places with the express ambition of signaling the worthiness, and the spatial symbolism, of Britain's imperial guardianship. The Dutch carried out a similar project of spatial appropriation in turn-of-the-century Klung-kung, the home of the volcanic Mount Agung, "considered by the Balinese to be 'the navel of the world.' "40 With the rise of modern technology in warfare, it was increasingly likely that conflict would devastate local landscapes and with them local economies and populations. In East and South West Africa, German colonial forces came not to see the landscape as an obstacle to their operations, but rather imagined it as a vehicle through which they could achieve their aims. When soldiers burned villages and fields, destroyed cattle and plundered food reserves, they were aiming for "the total destruction of the indigenous population's means of life"—tactics that were a direct response to "flexible" and successful indigenous guerilla strategy.41 ■[ 316 ]• ■[ 317 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL The natural world, of course, not only became a target of imperial coercion but also was at the h eart of cross-cultural contestation. European colonial forest and wildlife policy catalyzed outright revolt in the Maji-Maji Rebellion in the Gei-man colony of Tanganyika. Colonial officials pressured local peasants to produce cotton for export, and this demand, together with imperial encroachment on the political economy of ivory, the closing off of hunting frontiers, and anxieties over their ancestral shrines, fed deep-seated anxieties among a range of local communities. Here colonialism effectively attempted to close off the forests— disrupting traditional African economic practices and curtailing access to culturally valued sites. These intrusions led a wide range of communities to t.:kc up arms against colonial rule in a two-year war in the forest from 1905.42 Elsewhere, as on the northwest frontier in British India, anticolonial guerrillas on the b. t der routinely raided local food and livestock holdings, eroding the wealth of ready vulnerable communities in order to sustain their own campaigns again'.-imperial power. Such examples suggest that the struggles over landscape and resources intensified as imperial regimes extended their global reach and "deliberate environmental warfare" became an increasingly important aspect of these modern con flicts. In numerous contexts, colonial governments attempted to consolidate their power and extend their economic resources by reorganizing the relationships between communities and the land: whether we think of drive to clear jangli (wild) lands in India and turn nomadic communities into sedentary tax-paying cultivators, the transplantation of techniques, seeds, fertilizers, and management practices from Japan to Korea and Taiwan to enable these colonies to bs transformed into granaries for the Japanese imperial system, or even the British imperial soldier-settlement schemes that quickened the pace of deforestation in Canada and Australasia. The relationship between the military and imperial government with respect to the environment could be more or less formal, and more or less successful in terms of imperial security, of course, depending on the context. "Frontier colonization" of the kind that happened on the Russian steppe, and which disrupted and displaced so many (mostly Muslim) communities anr "resettled" so many different populations (including Jews), was propelled by th>. butt of a rifle as well by the growl of the empty stomach. In Turkestan, peasants could be armed by a military governor and hence could approximate settler- soldiers, but that could also be a fleeting status when the gift of the rifle was withdrawn for the sake of "imperial security." The Indian Forestry Service, which combined principles of conservation with imperatives of exploitation, regularly hired ex-army men; these linkages deepened in times of war when the extractive interests of the Forestry Service were called upon by colonial officials responding to the exigencies of maintaining a global imperial army. The same combination of bureaucratic oversight and quasi-military forest clearing occurred in French colonial Indochina, where by the 192.0s the colonial project to dredge and clear the Mekong Delta was the third-largest earthmoving exercise in human history (behind the construction of the Panama and Suez canals). This undertaking was designed to improve coastal agriculture and facilitate more efFective commerce and communication, but it was also celebrated by the French as evidence of the improving power of colonial rule in the face of rising anticolonial sentiment.43 Far from being contained to episodic battles or short-term wars, imperial militarism brought with it, then, long-lasting spatial consequences. In addition to being a major player in the shaping and reshaping of the colonial environment, imperial military complexes were also fiscal and bureaucratic organisms. They could reorganize conquered territories formally and informally, through centralized mechanisms or more haphazardly, in comparative isolation or concert with commercial interests. From the Roman Empire onward, camp followers have helped to guarantee that the military space on the ground is never the exclusive purview of official personnel. Across the global territories of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, barracks abutted a variety of neighborhood and community formations, sponsoring all manner of encounters between soldiers and civilians, buyers and sellers, doctors and patients, children and adults, women and men. In these encounters, existing cultural identifications were affirmed (where soldiers were identified as Sikh, Pathan, Maori, or Kamba) even as new relationships were created. Highland soldiers, whether in Montreal or the Punjab, delighted in the spectacle their "exotic" garb created across the barracks line; Private Fred Bly of the 72nd Seaforth regiment remembered fondly how his uniform had brought not just stares but "all sorts of eatables and drinkables" from the locals when he was stationed in British-occupied Bloemfontein during the South African War.44 These kinds of social relationships were formalized in World War I and World War II when significant enterprises developed in •[ 318 ]• TONY BALL ANT YNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON \ imperial port cities and way stations, as new restaurants, sightseeing venturti and brothels developed to allow colonial soldiers en route to the battlefields of North Africa and Europe to encounter the 'exotic." Such fraternization across physical and socially symbolic space was not limited to soldiers in arms. Men HI. ■ Maurice Tinkler and Harry Dirpsose were members of the Shanghai militaiv i police in the inter war years. Former army men, they regularly transgressed tlv white-yellow boundary that structured the International Settlement and wei e just as routinely called on to intervene in the social lives of English aristocrat! and Chinese servants—work that took them far from the police station and inn. the recesses of imperial Shanghailander life.''5 , L It was rare enough in this period for barracks and garrisons to serve as site1-for mutiny, as happened at Yen-bay in 1930, when Vietnamese troops killed then French superiors and took control of the town. That kind of open resistance in variably resulted in brutal suppression, but in Yen-bay it also ignited anticolonial feeling among Vietnamese students and workers (and a minority of French intellectuals) in the ensuing months and years.46 As historians have been suggesting in the last decade or so, imperial armies and their bureaucratic apparatus have done more than leave carnage or the remnants of battle or even the detritus of military tourism in their wake. Not only have they impacted the spatial order of local and regional political economies, they have contributed to the racial and sexual orders of those domains as well. The site of the cantonment—permanent or semipermanent military quarters—is perhaps the most telling in this regard. Established primarily in the context of the British Raj (India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka), cantonments served as a locus for commercial, medical, and sexual contact between colonizer and colonized—a locus whose spatial parameters shaped the nature and character of that contact in myriad ways. As with all ostensibly "military" spaces, the boundaries of the cantonment were at once regulated and porous: soldiers and local natives came and went in ways that were formally overseen, but they also developed strategies that were less susceptible to surveillance. With the legislation of a variety of contagious diseases acts in the 1860s and onward, cantonments became a scene of increased scrutiny. Native women who were deemed prostitutes were compelled to register as such and submit to medi- V: - cal examination in order to guarantee that that they were physically "clean" and would not transmit disease to European soldiers who frequented them. Already ; EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL a space of racialized and sexualized encounter, this legal provision made the cantonment a place of hygienic discipline as well. Thanks to the work of Anglo-American women missionaries, it became a theater of metropolitan imagination as well. Their reports of the horrors of prostitution and their insistence that the British Empire's military should not be permitted to license such behaviors created a public scandal at home, materializing what had been heretofore invisible territories of rule for a Victorian imperial public readily sensationalized by both sex and empire in the name of respectability and reform. Nor was the question of sexual encounter in the context of the imperial military complex limited to the British Empire. American occupation forces in the Philippines, Haiti, Japan, and a variety of other imperial "outposts" drafted local women to serve the sexual needs of American troops in state-inspected brothels, even as they constructed discourses about the immorality of those women that were linked to deep-seated presumptions about racial difference. Given the patriarchal bargain at the heart of all modern empires, it can hardly be surprising that at moments of the transfer of power—as when American military rule was established in postwar Korea—there was more continuity than discontinuity in the sexual economy. One long-standing spatial consequence has been the long life of "camptowns" (in Korean, gijchon) with ongoing effects on local populations across several generations. American women in postwar occupied Japan, like their British forerunners in the debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts, also got involved in public discussions about the impact of this situation on the "civilizing mission" of the United States, which in turn galvanized political opinion at home. In spatial terms, then, the specter of interracial sex and the social and political anxieties it caused allowed imperialists at home and in situ to map a new relationship between metropole and colony via sexualized forms of reference and to draw occupied territories into new imaginative, and highly gendered, landscapes.47 Needless to say, these were not issues unique to Western imperialism. As in the case of comfort women—those women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military—the combination of soldiers' perceived sexual needs and the presumptions about the sexual availability and disposability of colonized women that underpinned imperial rule created a variety of coercive spaces of encounter with far-reaching implications for the project of empire and for postcolonial societies as well. This can and should be seen as part of Japan's "one-body" project TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON for Korea: a grim metaphor for assimilation at all scales of being. We would not like to suggest, of course, that bounded military spaces were the only places where interracial sexual contact took place. For one thing, they were generative of other spaces—like the brothel, the contagious disease examination room, the streetwalkers ambit—where contact occurred and was in turn policed. And we need only think of a treaty port like Shanghai, which was governed in part by Western powers, in part by Asian and Western business interests, to appreciate how complex the boundaries enabled by colonialism and semicolonialism might be. In fact, port cities across the world—from Marseilles to Suva, from Southampton to Port-au-Prince—were spaces where soldiers, sailors, and military personnel of all kinds had opportunities to experience the pleasures and the dangers of both heterosexual and homosexual encounters. Nor were these encounters just about white men and their nonwhite partners. The seduction of the African tirailleur in the streets of Marseille was a mild obsession of interwar French observers and generated "a web of regulations" limiting how prostitutes could solicit, even speak to, men on the street.4' It was precisely the liminality of such militarized zones, their capacity for seepage into regular, quotidian spaces of imperial and colonial life, that made reformers of all kinds into disciplinarians of the male and female body, colonized and colonizer alike. Evangelizing Space Missionaries were among the chief sponsors of imperial contact and one-to-one encounter in this period. Although a variety of clerical orders dispatched the faithful from Western Europe across the world from the earliest days of Christianity, the nineteenth century inaugurated a period of accelerated missionary activity and missionary visibility. During this period missionary heroes like David Livingstone—the Scottish Congregationalist missionary whose exploration of central and southern Africa between 1854 and 1873 transfixed international audiences—were celebrated by metropolitan print media for demonstrating how evangelism served what Victorians called the "the three Cs" of empire: Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce. Those triple commitments involved Western missionaries in a variety of power relationships with colonized peoples and, as histories of the missionary project have been at EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL ■■I ■ 4 IBS IBl sílili slsil ÉSiii ■ HermannsburgMission, Northern Territory, Australia, 1930. This mission, established by German Lutheran missionaries in the 1870s, remained an important site for cross-cultural engagement into the middle of the twentieth century. It was troubled by poor funding, disease, and the legacies of Aboriginal dispossession. (© E. O. Hoppe/Corbis) pains to demonstrate, often in an angular relationship with both their superiors at home and the official imperial enterprise—in ways that could throw the very bases of metropolitan policy and power into question.45 The growing influence of indigenous evangelists attached to missions and the emergence of vibrant native churches, especially in Africa and the Pacific, meant that Christianity's global reach was profoundly extended between 1870 and 1945. But conversion depended on complex acts of linguistic and cultural translation by both missionaries and indigenous peoples: in other words, Christianity's spread was grounded in its vernacularization and indigenization. The growing numbers of nonwhite colonized peoples who identified themselves as Christians in this period also complicated the cultural terrain of empires. Native Christians were not only adept at using the Bible to question the inequalities of colonialism, but at a fundamental level their cultural visibility also challenged the easy equations that some Europeans frequently made between Christianity and whiteness.50 ■[ 3". ]• •[ 3^3 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON Against the backdrop of the imperial globalization of Christianity, the ideological work of race was as complex as it is important. Not only was it bound up with presumptions about the right gender order that should obtain in colonial places, it was shaped as much, if not more so, by class-specific ideas about hygiene, literacy, and political rights—questions that missionaries invariably took up as they tried to propagate the faith among native communities. Nor was the movement of such ideas necessarily one-directional. Missionary work perhaps best exemplifies the ways in which the colonial experience beamed a host of ideals— about work, domesticity, conjugality, and virtue—modified by the messy entanglements of the mission station and classroom back "home." These complex flows were in turn internalized in domestic culture and became a natural part of the cultural landscape. So, for example, missionary men and women might have arrived in the colonies with certain expectations of what "savages" looked and acted like, but those presumptions would have already been shaped by their apprehensions of a "savage" working class at home. Given the feedback loop that travel and missionary literature enjoyed, and helped to shape, readers in metropolitan spaces from London to Moscow and beyond had access to images of all kinds of natives, savages, aborigines, and heathen from the tribal hills of India to the Russian Caucasus.51 In turn, images of converted natives were mobilized in reforming efforts, and they became instruments that could be deployed in contests over sexual morality, work discipline, and the nature of "true faith" at home. Moreover, depending on their own class status (which was most often of the lower to middling sort), missionaries may have viewed indigenous marriage practices through the lens of an aspirant (as opposed to fully accomplished) bourgeois identity. Frequently this was an identity that would have been consolidated precisely as a result of their encounter with native polygamy, for example, and imported with renewed vigor and conviction in London or Paris or the farmlands of the American Midwest. Histories of these kinds of "counterflows to colonialism" challenge conventional notions of how the movement from imperial to colonial space worked in theory and practice and allow us to reimagine what the map of imperial power looked like on the ground in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.52 Despite the rich and growing literature on missionary work and empire, the spatial arrangements of the mission station—which was often the geographical EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL center of formal and informal mission settlement—are rarely attended to. Mission stations articulated a visually and experientially powerful claim to local lands and communities by laying out the spaces of evangelism and their concomitant social services. At the same time, mission stations were matked off in expressly territorial terms from the "native spaces" that surrounded them. From these bridgeheads missionaries launched their campaigns for reform and conversion: they disrupted traditional forms of self-government, realigned local and regional work patterns, and, not least, sought to refashion a wide variety of indigenous domestic, child-rearing, healing, and bodily practices. This is not to say, of course, that missionary control of hearts and minds and even bodies was total. Missionaries across the globe engaged in compromises and hybrid solutions to the problem of "native conversion." As a consequence, mission stations typically were contradictory spaces. They were celebrated as sites of religious and cultural transformation, but in reality they were never were entirely free or independent of local practices and beliefs. Mission stations became locations where missionary teachings coexisted with long-standing indigenous cosmologies as well as new localized forms of Christianity popularized by native converts and evangelists. In many cases missionaries worked hard to delineate clear boundaries between the holy and moral spaces of their compounds and the remainder of "white society," boundaries that were demarcated by fences and policed through a close attention to who was entering and leaving through the stations gates. The mission station, with its multiple functions, its power to shape the nature and character of the imperial encounter, and above all its intrusive physical presence on the landscape, was a crucial instrument of imperial power, even when missionaries found themselves at cross-purposes with specific national-imperial agendas. In fact, the spatial logic of the mission varied significantly from place to place, empire to empire, even denomination to denomination. There was just a handful of Christian mission schools in Taiwan at the moment of Japanese takeover, and imperial officials moved quickly to bring them under control; after 1905 pressure for conformity to a series of metropolitan regulations intensified, which effectively sidelined missionary education there. At Omsk on the Russian steppe, there were eight or nine different posts (stany), with a central coordinator and a staff of thirty in 19 00 to accomplish "the staggeting task" of anchoring orthodoxy among native populations. Some stany might have a school or a hostel, but these were ■[ 314 ]• ■[ 3*5 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL unevenly distributed across the landscape; and given the harsh weather conditions, mission outreach was seasonal. Elsewhere, the mission station and the mission settlement, while related, were not necessarily coterminous spatially. The latter was largely if not exclusively residential, whereas the former could be semicommercial as well as pedagogical, both literally and figuratively. Educational opportunity was clearly the biggest draw at the mission station; instruction in the basics ("reading, writing and a little arithmetic," as one Jesuit father in Africa put it) was accompanied by emphasis on good manners and "moral cleanliness," rooted in the genuine desire to make better subjects of colonized peoples, But education also took place on a physical landscape where the stability of mission stations stood in stark contrast to the decimation of native lands, communal and otherwise. At Chishawasha in Mashonaland, missionary work was literally bound up with imperial occupation. In the 1890s, for example, Cecil Rhodes made grants to Methodists and awarded the Jesuits twelve thousand acres of farmland and in exchange for their assurance that missionary schools would be established in villages and that native headmen would help to guarantee attendance. Not only were local livelihoods held hostage to the fortunes of the mission station and its ancillaries, but by the 1920s the elaborate sites of the Jesuit Chishawasha Mission posed a stark contrast to the burnt homes and fields and confiscated cattle and crops in both Mashonaland and Matabeleland. Access to Western education here created a species of debt peonage in which territorial imperatives were paramount. "For people coming to settle on our farms," wrote the Jesuit father Francis Richartz, "I... stake the condition that they must send their children to school—or I will not have them."53 This case is arguably unusual, if not unique: it is rare enough that the connections between the interests of colonial state power and of missionary space were so bald or so evident. On the other hand, in many colonial spaces missions dominated the provision of Western education, a fact that gave them considerable leverage and that dramatized the social, economic, and political power of the mission station and especially the mission school. If we think about the literal route to those places—the journey to the school, the dress code required for crossing the threshold of the classroom, the embodied experience of the boy or girl seeking education or the mother looking for help for a sick infant—we gain an appreciation for just how keenly the reterritorialization that mission work 4 3*6 ]• aimed to accomplish might have been felt in this instance of colonial encounter. For some girls living under colonialism, the road to school was a metaphor for the relationship between tradition and modernity. For others, like Serah Mu-kabi, who feared the hyenas along the route to her mission school in Thogono ! (Kenya) and whose father threatened to kill her because he was so opposed to J women's education, it was literally a hard and dangerous walk." r l Once there, the interiors of the mission station were absolutely consequen- } tial, not just to the processes of evangelization and conversion, but equally to the \ broader civilizing project. One very particular example is instructive: that of the I dormitory of the mission school. A space to sleep, the dorm also functioned as a I boundary between home life and school routine and, in the case of native girls, I as a barrier to unwanted physical contact from male relatives and peers and even >' protection against early marriage. Given the possibility of predatory male teach- ers, it was not an entirely safe space either, especially (if not only) for girls. If the I mission station was a porous space where local natives could mix with white mis- I sionaries somewhat freely, it was also the prototypically segregated and regulated [- space for native women. That regulation involved not just same-sex classrooms i and gender-specific curriculum, but an almost exclusive focus on training in the ; domestic arts and sciences. In this sense, as a spatial complex the mission station ; articulated what imperial evangelization was all about: the reproduction of very specific geographies in native communities—with the reordered indigenized version of the Western bourgeois Christian home chief among them. i. I L Spaces of Work I Given the centrality of colonial labor to the functioning of the imperial world f system, it makes sense that spaces of work should be counted among the most J) important sites of encounter, conflict, resistance, and negotiation. If the planta- '■ tion is the most obvious site for examining these kinds of experiences, its long I'' life beyond the formal emancipation of slaves is often glossed over in accounts of I modern Western imperialism. So, for example, slavery was done away with by ■1 the British Parliament of 1834, but as a legal category it was not abolished in Zanzibar until 1897 and in Kenya not until 1907. And contrary to the dominant I grand narratives of British historiography, rhe economic entanglements of the i: |; '[ 3^7 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL slave trade persisted long after the 1830s for both ex-slaves and profiteers. Escape from the plantation—from its cartographies of work, coercion, and routine— was as slow in historical terms as it was uneven in spatial terms. As physical -V" spaces, plantation properties remained the focus of agrarian production after ' emancipation but they competed for ex-slaves' attention not only with their own ! plots, but with a myriad of economic opportunities beyond the plantations boundaries. Nor were attempts to bend workers' will to demands of plantation owners always successful. Colonial governments in East Africa, for example, engaged in a variety of strategies to try to keep plantations profitable: strategies j that involved migrant labor and that led in turn to the emergence to racial hier- ■ archies of value based on perceived strengths and weaknesses of various African i groups, comparisons that typically favored the Nyamwezi, adept traders and hunters from the region between Lake Victoria and Lake Rukwa." The association of plantation work with slavery and hence with blackness tout court had a long history before the twentieth century, of course. In the French Caribbean, for example, "noir" was equivalent not simply to slave but to someone who worked in the physical space of the plantation." What the Nyamwezi case underscores is that the dominance of free labor created spatial parameters for the consolidation of new racialized systems of colonial and imperial labor. Emancipation did not bring an end to the use of coercion and exploitation in imperial work spaces, nor did it curtail arguments that used cultural difference to argue that particular peoples (races, tribes, religious communities, and clans) were particularly suited to specific times of heavy physical labor. Thus the formal end of slavery did not prompt a broader reassessment of the fundamental cultural categories that ordered the division of labor in most colonies. As historians of women and gender have also been at pains to emphasize, the transition to free labor made women's work more invisible than ever as "the claims to masculine entitlement forged through revolutionary struggles to end slavery ... ensured the persistence of gender inequality in postslave societies."57 Both the parameters of that postslave world and its gendered, racialized dimensions are enlarged when we consider the Indian Ocean as a space through which hundreds of thousands of indentured bodies—mainly male—circulated in the wake of slavery's abolition, spurred by new settlement patterns up and down the African coast and harnessed to new forms of labor organization in South Africa. The traffic in male laborers between the interior of India and "Zu-luland" in the latter part of the nineteenth century created a corridor of reserve labor as well as a set of sub-imperial political economies that illustrate the variety and the constantly shifting geographical character of the racialized configurations in the world of imperial work. Indian indentured laborers, of course, were also crucial in the functioning of post-emancipation plantation economies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Between 1879 an over sixty thousand men from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India were shipped to Fiji to work on the sugarcane plantations that the British developed as the economic base of the colony after the cession of Fiji's sovereignty to the United Kingdom in 1874. The British governor of Fiji, Sir Arthur Gordon, a former governor of Mauritius and Trinidad, believed that Fijians were in danger of being marginalized in the same manner as Aborigines and Maori, and he constructed a system of governance designed to fortify the indigenous community, which had been already severely affected by disease and land loss to incoming white capitalists. Gordon imposed heavy restrictions on the employment of native Fijians as laborers, effectively prevented sales of native lands, and implemented a system of indirect rule that fortified preexisting indigenous systems of governance. On the other hand, Gordon championed the use of indentured Indian labor, and in many ways Fiji's development rested on the exploitation of these South Asian workers. This bifurcated economic and cultural system was in time further complicated by the arrival of significant numbers of free Punjabi and Gujarati migrants who became important figures in the commercial life of the colony and whose presence called into question some of the basic racial presuppositions that ordered the colony's unique social formation.58 If post-emancipation plantations were spaces that were heavily dependent on migration and mobility, colonial diamond mines were much more bounded, the transportation routes and the migration of laborers to and from them notwithstanding. The comparatively enclosed character not just of mining work but also of social intercourse in and around the pits created spaces for all manner of sexual encounters between African men and boys in places like Kimberley in the 1880s, where small huts were gradually replaced by hostels where a dozen or more men might share bunks. The impact of rumors and more formal allegations of nkotshana, the practice of taking "boy wives" that colonial officials understood •[ 32-9 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON Kimberley Diamond Mine, Kimberley, South Africa, ca, 1890-1905. This mine was established after the "New Rush" of 1S71. By 1S73 the nearby township of Kimberiey was the second-largest settlement in South Africa. Massive numbers of laborers were deployed in the mining operations. (Library of Congress) as sodomy, was not limited to South Africa; concerns about such encounters were rife among officials in Mozambique and were linked to the importation -.if thousands of Chinese laborers to Africa for work in the mines by the turn of the century as well. In the Transkei Territories in the late 192.0s, "(gold)mine marriages" were ignored by company officials, feared and scorned by missionaries, and considered "unspeakable" by urban African male elites.55 While diamonds and gold were pivotal in the world economy in this peri'm:. coal was also a crucial tributary of global capitalism, especially in the context of two twentieth-century imperial wars. In the Ottoman Empire, conditions at. 1 e surface of mines were almost as grim as those below: shelters were makeshift and horrific accidents were not limited to the mine itself. In the British imperial EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL context, the precincts of the coal mine were sites where a variety of encounters played out, often in highly gendered ways. Indian nationalists in the interwar period saw work by women underground not only as calling into question some basic cultural assumptions about gender but also as threatening India's aspirations to civilizational parity with Britain, But at the same time, the mine was a place where presumptions about white imperial masculinity operated in tension with colonial men's convictions about their autonomy and respectability. This was especially true in places like Nigeria, where mining officials understood their role as making "men" into "boys," where "the emasculation of African men was a core tenet of colliery managerial practices," and where "racism was an organizing principle of authority in the colonial labor process." Protests sparked by these conditions were organized and effective, not least because they caught the attention of the state by demonstrating that colonial workers were not as pliable as the agents of imperial capitalism might wish, but also because they demonstrated to local communities that modernizing work had its own political and social capital. Through desertion, strike action, and perhaps most significantly, the creation of a variety of spaces where miner-financed social welfare activities flourished (schools, hospitals, meeting houses), the coal miners at the Enugu Government Colliery staged performances of a particularly African industrial masculinity that gave the lie to racialist discourses of African laziness and had consequences for "native," regional, and international labor struggles.60 Despite the importance of female colonial labor in a range of social spaces— from the coal mine to the kitchen, the school to the brothel—to metropolitan observers in the British, French, Russia, Ottoman, or Japanese empires, the colonial worker typically remained presumptively male. Victorian readers of London-based periodicals may have occasionally seen images of an Indian female tea-plantation worker or indeed an Irish woman agricultural laborer, but as in the historiography on empire and work until very recently, rhe laboring body was muscular, tireless, even machine-like: all masculine qualities and all mobilized to render the worker as nothing but body. By the turn of the twentieth century nearly 40 percent of tea plantation workers in Assam were women, partly as the result of the aggressive recruitment of single women—a project with its own spatial practices and geographical ambits. Needless to say, conditions on the plantations and in the physical spaces of the tea gardens were instrumental to the high TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL mortality rates among workers. The incapacity of overburdened and physically exploited women workers to breed more tea-pickers was consequential to the success of global output of a highly lucrative colonial enterprise like tea cultivation. Even more significantly, given the ways in which "free" male post-emancipation labor has been mobile and women have been considered immobile, there is much to be done both to historicize the gendered implications of colonial work and to rematerialize the various spaces of colonized women's labor. Much of that labor was undoubtedly agricultural, if not plantation labor per se. The peasant household was not limited to the family abode, and colonial women across a variety of imperial terrains did "not only the actual work of cultivation or supervision but also petty commodity production, gathering and foraging, food processing, retail and even waged work"—family labor, some or all of which might fall within the shadow of the actual family home.61 As in Europe, the family economy blurred the boundaries between home and work. The predominance of women silk workers in the Ottoman Empire is one of many examples that demonstrates how crucial they were to household economic stability, and not just as extra-income producers. The advent of the textile industry in places like British India—by 1900 there were eighty-six mills in the Bombay Presidency, for example—brought women into historically new and culturally alien spaces with profound consequences for both the stability of imperial rule and the direction of anti-imperial politics. As with the mines, factories were both self-contained spaces with dangers from which women were believed to need protection and porous sites with tentacled pathways (railway, roads) that might lead women astray or encourage an excess of independent action and thinking. In terms of sheer numbers, colonized women who worked as laborers far exceeded those privileged few who had access to Western education and managed to get trained and find work as midwives, doctors, or teachers. For those elites, the meaning of spaces like the nursery, the hospital, and the classroom were inflected by gender. Colonial men who dared to defy the spatial parameters of professionalism by training as educators or doctors undoubtedly faced racial prejudice at work; colonial women who did so bore what is now widely recognized as the added burden of being doubly out of place—of being a native in a European or Japanese world and of being a woman in a man's world. Nor was this challenge limited to the spaces of the hospital ward or the classroom. As we have seen in the case of Serah Mukabi above, getting to and from those spaces, traversing the material and the symbolic boundaries that imperialized terrains repeatedly threw up, shaped the nature and character of their mobility in ways that have left their mark. And needless to say, if the colonial worker was viewed primarily as male, the sex worker was viewed exclusively as female and colonially "native," even where, as in British India, for example, Eurasian women and Jewish women also numbered among the ranks of prostitutes. As objects of imperial scrutiny, anxiety, and reform, female sex workers were as critical to the functioning of empires as they were central to the quest for moral authority that imperial officials sought to harness through the regulation of their hardworking, mobile, and often diseased bodies.62 Empire at Home Among the most ideologically charged—and materially transformed—spaces of imperial encounter in this period was the home. As sites of labor, biological and social reproduction, consumption and violence, the colonial house and home were rarely the idyllic spaces invoked by social reformers or the bourgeois metropolitan imagination. Economic pressures and demographic constraints meant that these dwellings were often at odds with the idealized vision of the cultivated home where the "angel of the house" presided and protected the family from the worldliness of public life with all its vulgarity and corruption. Feminist historians have successfully challenged the gendered dichotomies of home (female) versus work (male) by demonstrating how structurally embedded nineteenth- and twentieth-century households were in the political economy of the nation and how national, imperial, and anticolonial debates left their mark on domestic lives and subjectivities. In fact, one of the most significant and analytically flexible categories to emerge with a renewed emphasis from recent imperial history and colonial/postcolonial studies is "domesticity." This concept has become indispensable because historians have insisted on understanding it as a spatial category with the capacity to open out onto and to open up a host of traditional rubrics (work, politics, the economy) that have not been seen as domains either of women or of gendered interpretive possibility—or have been so only comparatively recently, historiographically speaking. This is especially germane because ■[ 333 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL the period between 1870 and 1945 marked not only the greatest extent of Eui 1 1 '. imperial reach but also the apex of a certain globally powerful notion of bo'iiigw.j,, respectability. This was an aspirant social formation framed around decph \v 1. dered and racially specific forms of domesticity that served as the templar f(i civilizational progress and achievement in ways that plotted men, women, 1(| children very deliberately in relation to household space. The precincts cf i'u J(. mestic were, in short, a constitutive feature of imperial and colonial encoimrci \ .n the context of global modernity, so much so that it may not be too much to souk of empires as carriers of ideas and practices of a domesticity that circulated Ah ally and were under debate from Algiers to Zanzibar, Sheffield to Sydney. The portability of metropolitan ideals to the colonies was a staple of impi\ history well before the subject of domesticity erupted on the scene in the 19 Sc. There are few more evocative images than that of the English woman seitiiu1 up a full-scale tea service in the middle of a (usually geographically unspecified)' |u \ gle." This was an image made believable by Maud Diver and other late-Viam ,11 writers who tried to capture the phenomenon of the "compleat Indian hou-«e-keeper" whose dominion in the home was thought to be its own form of an imperial military maneuver, whether home was suburban London or in the sh of Government House, Calcutta. A host of other contemporaries coIlucUd m this presumption, from missionaries to travel writers to imperial ofKcia.i. Mou if not all, of these commentators took the nuclear family and the European m class household as their model for what "natives" should aspire to if they Wuhe-i to demonstrate their capacity to resemble—by approximation, if not by cor 1 identification—Western family forms and, ultimately, to participate i:-. W^'T^rn political forms as well. In colonial India, the ideal of companionate -narrnj. held up as the pathway for natives who wished to realize their social and po. t <. 1. aspirations for self-government. This model was juxtaposed against the cxd. familial arrangements and especially the practices of early marriage and p"l^;-amy that were believed to be rampant among the "heathen races." It is *n th underscoring here that the colonial reformist vision of companionate ma 11 ij'Jl was a conjugal ideal with very particular spatial prescriptions as well. Fr 1 1 ot only should Indian women be educated so that they could come out oi pui-dah (seclusion) and join their husbands as equals—thereby offering demonstrable evidence of those husbands' legitimacy as men, by bourgeois Ei opiuii ■[ 334 ]• - ipilards—they should also arrange their everyday household routines so that education (typically in the "science" of motherhood and domestic life) nuld in turn all°w chem to reorganize the gendered spatial conventions that L.,.(l DOth the Hindu and the Muslim home. In concrete terms, this meant niiv at table with their husbands and children, supervising the servants, and ]iii>\ 1 ig effortlessly across the threshold of home into the public, social, and often political worlds of men. Those worlds were increasingly "mixed," not just in terms of men and women, but (however unevenly and uneasily) in terms of 1 in as well, especially in Indian cities and their immediate suburbs. Thus, not oiih were the spaces of domesticity remade inside the colonial household, they collided well beyond the physical spaces of house and home, giving the lie to tliL .units of the domestic and its apparent disconnect from politics in its mi-liii . ~d macro forms. (. ]i itics of the new imperial history in the British context have been eager to x connections made between what they persistently view as cultural domains, ke domesticity, and the putatively "real" spaces of power like politics at the institutional level. The career of W. C. Bonnerjee, first president of the Indian fational Congress and a passionate modernizer when it came to the lives of his 'ife and his daughters, would appear to ratify the claim that the precincts of omesticity need to be viewed in as capacious an analytical frame as possible. For Honnerjee worked hard to rearrange the internal dynamics of his family house-old so that his wife could assume a companionate role. This rearrangement elped to consolidate his political success in nationalist politics, even as his wife, I femangini, appears to have been an unwilling and even quietly resistant subject f his reformist plans. This South Asian example does more than illustrate the institutive role that domesticity played in reterritorializing the Raj. It also challenges the presumption that models of metropolitan domesticity were simply transplanted from Britain to the colonies. Elite Indian men like Bonnerjee, who spired to political participation and even self-government, actively participated 1 the reshaping of European ideals, and they by no means applied them whole-% tie: their attempts to produce a specifically Indian colonial "resolution" to the 'Oman question had spatial consequences that Indian women themselves re-■ :cl. I to, engaged with, and also helped to shape. What this suggests, among other tiiiiii;';, is that the territorializing power of empire was not the possession only of •[ 335 ]■ TONY BALL ANT YNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL British officials and reformers, as indigenous adherents to patriarchy could and did share ideological and strategic space when it came to securing a place for ! domesticity in the workings of imperial power.63 j House and home mapped the overlap between domains of the cultural, so- ; cial, and political in other ways as well. In the context of European imperialism* white women traveling through or living in colonial territories appeared to be breaking taboos by crossing into new "frontiers" on behalf of their sex. In addition, they were often critical to the redrawing of lines of division between black and white, especially given the prevalence of fears of miscegenation in such set- j tings. Servants were clearly a key node of contact and exchange. In Indonesia as :; in many other imperial locales, domestic servants were the only colonial people ■-r-c • Dutch women routinely met in daily life. Popular household manuals in Java recommended a minimum of seven domestics, and the majority of household workers were women, even though there were other forms of labor available to them.64 The presence of children in the European households of empire further complicated this tense environment: at least until a certain age, they were often in the charge of native servants, with whom they might become quite intimate. These intimacies interrupted the racialized demarcations of internal household space in ways that shaped not only "imperial motherhood" but of course those children's apprehensions of appropriate or desirable colonial distance as adoles-cents and in later life. The removal of European children to metropolitan boarding schools at a certain age also profoundly shaped the colonial household and reminds us how contingent the organization of labor and the shape of colonial institutions were on the rhythms of imperial family life. Beyond their responsibility for European children, domestic servants routinely challenged the spatial . j segregation of urban colonial cities and their rural outposts even as they were ;.";;:| coerced into new and emergent forms of apartheid inside the European home. j As late as the 1970s in South Africa the internal colonialism of the middle-class j "English" household persisted as more than a vestigial trace: not only were do-mestic workers segregated at the back of the main house, they ate substandard food and were allotted limited provisions (like toilet paper)—even as, whether men or women, they might be subject to the sexual depredations or everyday vio-lenrc of the master or mistress."5 The household was also, of course, the site of complex kinship systems, both entrenched and mobile—a phenomenon that some imperial officials and ethnographers (whether employed by the impetial state or not) grasped to a greater or lesser degree. Disruptions of those systems in spatial terms could be radical, as in the case of child removal in the Australian case, where Aboriginal families were viewed as spaces of "physical moral danger and neglect." These representations had concrete and terrible outcomes as they were deployed to justify breaking the circle of indigenous family life and eventuated in the painful legacy of the "Stolen Generations." That these practices served the aims and work of the state, there can be little doubt: Aboriginal children were expelled from state schools in early twencieth-century Katanning, in Western Australia, as part of a larger effort to clear the wheat belt and to respond to shifting heightened local concern about the presence of poor Aboriginals among dominant communities anxious about the preservation of white schools and hospitals.*6 Incursions into familial space could also be mote subtle, as when missionaries and their ancillaries tried to move into the household domain by serving as tutors in matters of domestic hygiene and child care. Significantly, in terms of assessing the reach of colonial power in spatial terms, such efforts were not so much resisted or ignored as they were seen to be irrelevant to the lives of the women and children they were targeting. So in the matrilineal society of colonial Asante, women interviewed about the impact of missionaiy work on their child-bearing practices effectively shrugged off the suggestion that their home spaces had been colonized—a very real pedagogical lesson about the limits of imperial reterritorializing in theoty and practice.67 At Home in the Empire? As scholars have been at pains to show over the last two decades, empire was never merely a phenomenon that took place "out there" without its real and symbolic effects being felt, seen, and lived "at home." In the context of Euro-American empires, the very grid of home and away that writers, officials, and administrators used to map the relationship between metropole and colony suggests the constitutive role that convictions about the "domestic" and its spatial importance had in shaping national and imperial imaginations. Inevitably perhaps, the rubrics ■[ 336 ]• •[ 337 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL char scholars have used For describing relationships of exchange and circulation have been spatial: whether they speak of "networks" or "circuits" or "flows" and "reverse flows," historians of modern empires have been acutely aware of empires' recerritorializing power, not just on the ground in colonial settings, but at the very hearts of Western empires as well. Debates in the historiography of the British Empire about the unevenness of imperialism s reach into "domestic" spheres are indicative of the high stakes of this reterritorializing legacy. This new work raises critical questions about where the nation ends and the empire begins, investing "home" and "away" with new historiographical meanings. These exchanges also demonstrate the continuing generative power of imperialism's spatial ambitions in the context of a globalizing world where students of the past are seeking genealogies for the contemporary present in the transnational spaces of earlier imperial moments. As we have suggested in our introduction, the relationship of imperialism to globalization is of course also a matter of great debate. If globality itself has entailed a redrawing of geopolitical space in ways that question the viability of discrete nation-states as arbiters of capital accumulation, military force, and the mobility of goods and people, attention to the dynamic relationship of domestic space and imperial power helps us at the very least to appreciate in historical terms how and why the reach of empires was so consequential to the making of the modern world. Most obviously, the processes of global commodification that nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires brought into being transformed the spaces of "home." Here again, and especially in the context of contemporary discourses about the newness of late twentieth-century globalization, it is important to underscore that the period 1870 to 1945 accelerated transnational economic connections and sutured them to a variety of globalizing capitalist work regimes, forms of accumulation, and mechanisms of delivery and consumption. Early modern history provides examples of transregional entrepreneurship, the Chinese commercial empire being the most prominent example and the career of the eighteenth-century Cantonese merchant Howqua being among the most compelling, if not representative. A scion of one of the top trading families in China, Howqua advanced millions of silver dollars to far-flung merchants and through his profits helped to shore up the Chinese Empire during the ill-fated Opium Wars just before his death in 1843. As significantly for our purposes, his portrait hung in the East India Hall of Fame in Salem, Massachusetts, reflecting the extent to which New England merchants keen to enter the China trade were dependent on his favor and assistance.68 Although the political economies of East Asia were worlds away, North American elites in the postrevolutionary period had dramatic evidence of their dependency on global forces and, however remotely, on the fortunes of a powerful Cantonese moneylender as well. By the later nineteenth century, the global circulation of goods was even more visible to consumers and empire builders alike. Workers in Glasgow who manufactured machinery used in the West Indies would have been able to glimpse the embeddedness of imperial circuitry in global capital. Port workers, warehousemen, and carriers as well as financiers would have understood how Canadian wheat, Iranian oil, Indian spices, Australian wool, New Zealand butter, Egyptian cotton, and Argentine meat both reflected and helped sustain Britain's aspirations for global dominance6' The visibility of imperial goods at home in late Victorian Britain did not simply grow out of the increasing marketing of imperial goods, but it was also partly a legacy of the very public agitation against the slave trade, a movement with deep roots in the eighteenth century. Opponents of the trafficking in slaves and plantation slavery made the daily effects of "exotic" commodities like tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar consumption in the metropole a critical part of their abolition rhetoric and practice, with middle-class women taking the lead in targeting the female householder as the key to putting an end to the oppression of her African and Caribbean "sisters." Slave and ex-slave men and women also labored in Britain to make clear the high price of slavery to provincial and urban offices alike. Their role in enabling Britons to visualize the horrors of the slave system has only recently begun to be fully recognized, while their work in making visible the links between slavery and imperialism is only beginning to be acknowledged. Victorian "national" memory figured sugar and slavery as among the most visible effects of empire at home, but they were by no means the only ones. Much less anxiety was expressed over the more familiar commodities that flowed in increasing volumes from the white dominions to Britain: high proportions of the wheat, lamb, beef, butter, and cheese consumed by Britons were produced in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Not only was this imperial commodity trade integral to the modern British diet, it also was pivotal in shaping the economic and ecological transformation •[ 339 ]• TONY BALL ANT YNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON of those colonies, ensuring that they would primarily develop as "farms for empire" until well after 19 45.70 While advertisements for these colonial commodities offered familiar image, — featuring white farmers working the fields of temperate colonies—goods from the tropics were generally marketed and packaged as exotic for European markets. From the "oriental bazaar" of Liberty's deparrment store to the advertisements for Pears soap that showed "little sambos," the connections between capitalism, empire, and cultural difference were routinely made manifest in Britain through material goods and print culture. They were no less visible to consun . is in the Third Republic in France, where advertisements, packaging, and sign, n were important vectors through which ideas about France's African, Asian, and Pacific colonial subjects reached metropolitan consumers.71 In the United States, where "empire" was a less commonly recognized fact of life (then and now), the consumption of foreign goods was seen as evidence of cosmopolitanism, inve ,t ment in America's overseas enterprises, and even patriotism, if not of manifest destiny itself By the twentieth century, middle-class homes across a host of irM perial sites might exhibit signs of imperial consumption not just as marks of status, but equally as marks of respectability, as the interior "Uzbek" design of inter war Soviet homes illustrates. Whether or not great numbers of the metropolian public in London or New York or Moscow were consciously aware of it, goods extracted from or produced in the colonies made domestic political economies: imperial and made it increasingly difficult to envision the national as a segregated or independent domain—especially when boycotts and other disputes over the control of colonial resources or labor erupted into the public sphere "at home." In turn, colonial goods and forms of cultural taste circulated broadly within: imperial systems, moving back out from the metropole to other colonial sites and directly between colonies. These flows meant that Indian fabrics and spices: as well as Chinese porcelain and lacquerware, as well as tea from both regions, became staples of middle-class material culture in colonies as distant as Australia and New Zealand.72 Colonial subjects and ex-colonial peoples also wandered all over the map in this period, and many of them crisscrossed the world, moving between metro- [ pole and colony and back again as well as between colonial spaces, reterritorial-izing empire through their search for educational opportunities, employments EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL ,-id even travel. Travelers are the easiest to spot because of the accounts they left nf their journeys showing the imperial gaze to which they were subject and -vhich they returned with equal ethnographic force. "Occidentalists" like the celebrated Ottoman writer Ahmed Midhat who visited the exhibitions and cit-k s of Europe not only reversed that imperial gaze, they offered readers at home a idjmpse of Western "civilization" through the prism of Ottoman modernity, presenting European progress even as they critiqued bourgeois social and sexual mores. Exhibitions were a major draw for colonial peoples, some of whom appeared as part of the exhibitionary spectacle while others, like the Javanese Raden Ayu Kartini, actively supported their cultural and economic endeavors. Her embrace of the Dutch National Exhibition of Women's Labor in The Hague 1 1898 was controversial, not least because she breached racial hierarchies by seeking solidarity with her white Dutch "sisters." Those colonials who sought or ended up with a political education, informal or formal, at the metropolitan "heart of empire"—like such figures of world-historical importance as Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh—defied the odds, carving cosmopolitan careers out of imperial systems with opportunity structures that were profoundly shaped by exclusionary logics and intricate hierarchies organized around race.73 The case of Ho Chi Minh is particularly instructive here. An early member of the Union Intercoloniale (founded 1923), he used its newspaper La Paria to think through his ideas about French colonialism, all the while using the streets of the metropole—and the highly racialized geographies of "Paris blanc et noir"— as his schoolroom.74 Lamine Senghor and his African compatriots appropriated French domestic space and the republican tradition similarly as part of a larger field of interwar discursive and political struggle over who counted as French and where the boundaries of the nation ended and the empire began." As for Gandhi in London and Johannesburg, questions of race and space—and the ways that they shaped gendered conventions of aspiring political subjects—were at the heart of these contestations, whether the site was the railway car, the vegetarian restaurant, or the halls of senates and parliaments. Elite subjects like these were certainly not representative of the hundreds of thousands who came from the "outposts" of empire to seek their fortunes its very heart. But as will be evident in Section 3, those from the colonies who did rise to prominence challenged more than just the presumption that "natives" were unequipped for self-governance. ■[ 340 ]• •[ 341 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Ho Chi Minh of the Republic of Vietnam in discussion with Marias Moutet, French minister of the colonies in the Colonial Ministry, Paris, ca. 1946. Ho Chi Minh not only played a pivotal role in the struggle for Vietnamese independence, but he also fashioned important connections with other ancicolonial leaders. (Popperfoto/Getcy Images) Through public careers, extensive networking, and a variety of legislative interventions they anticipated new, scarcely imagined geographies of postcolonial power and, in doing so, revealed both the presumptive whiteness (and masculinity) of imperial power no less than the vulnerabilities to which its boundaries ";j were continuously subject. Natives Making and Seizing Space ; Imperial officials seeking to manage indigenous populations utilized a variety of mechanisms for reterritorializing extant spatial relations both deliberately (as in the case of colonial cantonments) and somewhat less purposefully (as in the case of the diamond mines). Regardless of the level of intentionality, chose who sought to impose imperial power from the metropolitan center or on the ground in the colonies had to reckon with already existing forms of spatial practice, whether they were dealing with the marketplace, the jute factory, or the residential neighborhoods of "natives." The stakes of such practices were made evident both in moments of political crisis, such as the one generated in late imperial China in 1898 when "native-place lodges" were instrumental to the formation of Beijing political societies, or in the routinized rituals of colonial life, religious or secular— as in the Shinto shrine celebrations in early twentieth-century Seoul.76 The effective "tribalization" of Aboriginal peoples in New South Wales and Western Australia, the growth of the reservation system for native Americans in North America, and the emergence of apartheid in the new Union of South Africa— these all suggest how critical the spatial imaginary and its material realities were considered to be for the achievement of dominance by a variety of colonial states. In some cases, as in Ramahyuck (Victoria, Australia), the aim of the Moravian mission was expressly to create a "didactic landscape," one that would not only exhibit the virtues of hygienic living but "redefine Aboriginal peoples as individuals" by wrenching them from their kin-based contexts and, it was hoped, create a historically new form of self-consciousness in them.77 Such didacticism could have startling results. When Ranavalona III, queen of Madagascar, surrendered her royal palace to French soldiers in 1895, what she carried into exile was "the costly sedan chair King Radama II had received from Emperor Napoleon III"—just one of many Western-style accoutrements designed to teach members of the Imerina dynasty how to adapt native space to European colonialism.78 Among the many questions this history raises is the extent to which native communities internalized these imperial visions of the meaning of space and, more generally, what impact coercive spatial reorganization had on native daily life and on the shape of anticolonial resistance. One scholar of Australian Aboriginal communities has deemed this the segregation versus social autonomy dilemma. While it is difficult to reduce the vast historiographies of indigeneity to any one binary, this one does begin to capture the dynamics at work in native space-making in the face of colonial incursions that not only resulted in long-term dispossession but also attempted to impose new visions of the nature and meaning of space.79 The story of Lily Moya, a pseudonym given to a young Xhosa •[ 341 ]■ •[ 343 ]• TONY EALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL girl by the South African historian Shula Marks, is a case in point. As a young student seeking an education from a prospective English benefactor in the late 1940s, Lily's social trajectory was both restricted by the white colonial society to whose educational domains she wanted access and partly, though not fully, determined by the norms of that society.80 There is no doubt, of course, that the parameters of that Xhosa world were shaped inexorably by the fact of apartheid, itself a deeply spatialized articulation of racist and sexist power; nor were the two worlds of the apartheid system hermetically sealed. As students of Native American histories in the context of New World empires have argued, settlers and indigenous people created "mutually comprehensible" worlds in which "systems of meaning and of exchange" overlapped, conflicted, and were ultimately stitched together in an uneven and often precarious fashion.81 The challenge for those of us interested in more fully understanding what role the social cartographies of empire played in shaping the character of imperial power is to ask how we measure the historical significance, not just of the contact and contest born out of empires, but equally of the continued viability of native lifeways in both the autonomous and segregated spaces that were a consequential effect of imperial authority and power. We believe this requires attention to formal mechanisms of colonization without overestimating their reach. It requires recognition of the persistence and adaptability of indigenous spatial practices without romanticizing them merely as static traditionalism. As we have suggested here, contests over space-making in and around the native "home" are very useful for appreciating the limits of imperial power and the tenacity of indigenous forms of knowledge about the proper organization of domestic space, especially where the gendered division of the household was concerned. In many respects the history of the Raj is best understood through this frame. Well before Gandhi made swadeshi (lit. "one's own land": the purchase of Indian-made goods) a geopolitical mantra and the ashram (settlements organized around a guru) an alternative site of anticolonial resistance, British officials, missionaries, and nationalist bodies like the Indian National Congress argued over the merits of a reformed upper-caste Hindu household. In these contestations, subjects like sati (ritualistic widow burning), child marriage, and the ability of widows to remarry were often proxies for larger debates about whether self-government in the political arena needed to be preceded by evidence that Indian men were fit to govern their own homes. The lineaments of similar debates are recognizable in early twentieth-century Egyptian nationalist discussions of purdah, in which Egyptian women and feminists took the lead in an attempt to connect spatial emancipation and mobility with the national movement's wider claims about anticolonial struggle. If both of these examples reflect a shared bourgeois idiom, nationalist formations that did not derive from middle-class formations also had the politics of space at their core. This is perhaps most clear in the Mau Mau Rebellion in colonial Kenya. This uprising was energized by Kikuyu concerns over their greatly diminished landholdings under British rule and their steady drift into wage labor. Like nonwhite South Africans, the mobility of Kenyans had been radically circumscribed. The Native Registration Amendment Ordinance of 1910 had required all Kenyans over the age of 15 to carry a kipande, an identity document that allowed colonial officials to record the employment history of black workers and to restrict their movement across the landscape. Mau Mau aspirations were grounded in a desire to recover social autonomy and have the lands that were now locked up by white farmers returned to Kenyans: their agenda was grounded in a radical remaking and decolonization of colonial space. This agenda sparked a violent and coercive response: Mau Mau rebels were swiftly tried and condemned by colonial courts that made extensive use of the death penalty. Those acquitted were sent to special "camps" for reeducation while others were confined in "emergency villages" encircled by razor wire. The British use of summary execution, the widespread use of torture, and the confinement of colonized groups on a massive scale are perhaps the most telling evidence of the anxieties and anger that colonists expressed in the face of native groups who strove to reclaim colonial space.82 As tempting as it is to dwell on the most dramatic examples of anticolonial nationalism to drive home our point about the importance of space in the ways in which imperial powers set about remaking colonized domains, we also want to materialize some of the ways in which quotidian events illustrate the uneven pressure that imperial power and its agents, however determined they were to transform local people into legible imperial subjects, exercised on the ground in this period. This understanding does not reflect a presumption about the un-trammeled authenticity of "native" community making, but is instead shaped by '[ 344 ]■ •[ 345 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL The Maori prophet Rua Kenana in 1908. Rua, one of the most influential Maori prophetic leaders, challenged the British colonization of New Zealand. His followers called themselves Iharaira (Israelites), and they worked with Rua to construct a "City of God" at Maungapo-hatu. This initiative was an impediment to the extension of state power and drew Rua into protracted conflict with the New Zealand government. (James Cowan Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ) two decades of careful archival work that have allowed many historians to map the very uneven social and political terrains of colonial societies. In early twentieth-century New Zealand, for example, the prophet Rua Kenana established a community named the "City of God" under the sacred mountain Maungapohatu in the isolated Urewara district of the North Island. While Rua's prophetic visions combined Old Testament teachings with Maori tradition, he promised his followers that he would quickly develop the economic base of the community. This development would come not only through the reclaiming of lands confiscated by the colonial state, but also through the operation of a mining company and the creation of new transportation routes that would link the Urewara to the rest of the colony and the world beyond. This vision of economic development failed: the roads and railways were not built, and the population of the community had plummeted by the start of World War I. Even after colonial police raided Maungapohatu in 1916, killing two local men, Rua remained committed to both his prophetic vision of restoring Maori land and developing the region's economy. Neither happened within his lifetime: when he died in 1937, no roads had been completed and his followers remained impoverished.83 The vision of Rua Kenana encompasses many of the issues that are explored in greater depth in Sections 1 and 3, including the significance of imperial com- ■[ 346 ]■ munication and transportation networks and the ways in which small communities were increasingly drawn into political struggles over the legitimacy of imperial orders. In this section we have made a case that the growth of global imperial systems between 1870 and 1945 invested questions of space with new urgency and that, in particular, imperial orders were shaped by the ways in which they laced together understandings of cultural difference and imperial space. Throughout we have stressed that imperial visions were never easily fashioned into on-the-ground realities and that real colonial spaces and real colonized peoples forced the reworking and reshaping of many plans for the construction of carefully ordered colonial modernities. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that key colonial spaces—the barracks, the mission station, the home, the plantation, the mine— did real work in transforming both the cultural and the spatial sensibilities of colonized groups and in producing a series of debates and practices that had a truly global reach. We develop this argument further in Section z as we examine the ways imperial communication networks enabled the reconfiguration of space and allowed the increasingly rapid and efficient dissemination of ideas and arguments between colonial sites and across imperial systems. These integrative processes had unexpected consequences, however, as we make clear in Section 3, where we offer another perspective on the question of space as we examine how the growing connections between colonies enabled the emergence of new transnational networks of correspondence and solidarity that would energize the fight against empire and influence the shape of global geopolitics in the wake of World War II. •[ 347 ]• EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL 2. Remaking the World DURING the final third of the nineteenth century, imperial orders took on a new shape and quality. The technologies associated with steam power and electricity were increasingly central in the commercial practices, political regimes, and cultural debates of both European and non-European empires. It was only after 1870 that the steam locomotive, steamship, and telegraph finally overtook the horse, sailing ship, and messenger as the key means of communication on the global stage. These innovations allowed empire builders to import larger volumes of raw materials from their colonies with greater speed and at lower cost and also meant that it was cheaper to export greater amounts of finished goods back to colonial markets. As the "new imperialism" aggressively absorbed territories and incorporated distant lands into proliferating imperial systems, basic food plants, raw materials for industry, highly valued commodities, intricate machinery, delicate finished goods, commercial information, political news, and new ideas moved across greater distances, with greater frequency, and at greater speed. For contemporaries there was little doubt about the global significance of these developments. As the French free-trade politician Yves Guyot observed in 1885, colonial politics had the capacity to create ports, canals, and railroads "sur tous les points du monde."84 In this section our focus is on the interdependence between empire building and communication in the emergence of an increasingly integrated global order from 1870 into the early twentieth century. Our concern with the development of technologies and cross-cultural connections reflects the centrality of these issues within intellectual debates, political struggles, and cultural formations that unfolded across the globe in this period. Karl Marx suggested that railways, locomotives, and telegraphs were "organs of human will over nature" that made available to industrial nations "the power of knowledge, objectified."85 These technologies were fundamental to a rapaciously expansionist industrial order and were at the heart of the imperial systems that both fed and were shaped by this form of economic organization. Railways and telegraphs are prime examples of technologies that were embedded in complex systems of interrelated machinery, infrastructure, and institutions and that were dependent on a sophisticated assemblage of practices and processes which were undertaken at great speed and with great regularity. Requiring massive investments of capital and labor, detailed planning, extensive maintenance, and substantial managerial systems, these communication complexes became core elements of imperial practice from 1870. Technology and Imperial Modernity These complex technological systems frequently depended on colonial forms of bonded or semibonded labor—a new kind of imperial-industrial proletariat. They were also energized by incursions not just into colonized landscapes but into local political economies, community practices, and the recesses of the colonized self. This era, which began with the advance of the steamship and ended with the advent of airline travel as the ultimate expression of modern mobility, witnessed a series of technological developments that revolutionized the capacity of Westerners to get to remote and "exotic" places for a variety of purposes: philanthropy, tourism, reform, or a combination of all three. If the impulse behind the development of these new modes of transportation and transnational connection was economic, driven by the quest for markets and raw materials, one globally far-reaching result was the transformation of social relations between colonizer and colonized. These forms of mobility produced new sites of collision between those who worked the "lines of the nation" and those who glided through the nation and across the empire on them.86 Elite women—in Britain, France, Japan, China, Russia—were, arguably, the greatest beneficiaries of the freedom of movement that such technological advancement enabled, whereas subaltern subjects were increasingly locked in their social positions as laborers or as objects of increasingly elaborate state mechanisms that policed mobility and citizenship. The growing global ascendancy of these modes of communication and forms of connection played a primary role in the production of a volatile, shifting, and partially overlapping series of imperial cultural orders. These orders were powerful—capable of mustering large military forces, harnessing vast workforces, and deploying increasingly sophisticated and professionalized instruments of ■[ 348 ]■ •[ 349 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL surveillance and coercion—but they were constantly in process, being remade by new technologies, the push and pull of markets, and the brute struggles over access to resources, rights, and power that were at the heart of colonial encounters. These imperial orders were always in flux because they depended on laboring bodies who did not always acquiesce in the emergence of the new global industrial order and who, when they did, sought inclusion in it in ways that challenged the racial and gender hierarchies that comprised it from Paris to Beijing, Siberia to San Francisco. Given their work in the making of the railroads on several continents, it is not too much to say that Asian laborers were critical to the processes by which the world was connected in this period. Although the always-in-process nature of imperial social formations is most often associated with histories of imperial culture and identity, the case that empires were never discreet, fully self-contained systems can readily be made for the infrastructure of empires as well.87 This was particularly true in an age where imperial orders were increasingly dependent on international commerce, the construction of capital-intensive infrastructure, transportation and communication systems, and highly mobile colonial workforces that linked colonies to their neighbors as well as to the imperial metropole. At first glance it would seem that within such a context, the work of empire was increasingly disembodied—social communication, commercial transactions, and ideological contests that were previously grounded in personal contact were increasingly routinized in forms that were depersonalized, bureaucratized, and mechanized. Perhaps the clearest example of a kind of modern imperial bureaucracy comes from America's policy in the Philippines, where colonial authority rested upon the close surveillance of local populations and the construction of large bodies of data. This undertaking was based on an innovative complex of information technologies, including extensive telegraph and telephone networks, the widespread use of photography to document the colonized population, and the rapid production and efficient management of information through the use of the typewriter and numbered files. These technologies were at the forefront of America s attempt to assert its authority over the Philippines in the face of sustained challenges from a revolutionary national army, militant unions, messianic peasant leaders, and Muslim separatists. The Division of Military Information was at the forefront of this campaign, and it generated a vast amount of information about these various rebellious groups, information that was orga-: nized through a system of notecards that recorded data about each individual :}-;.;. believed to be opposed to American rule. A particularly striking example of this kind of imperial bureaucratic modernity was developed during the pacification of the capital city, Manila, as the American-created metropolitan police force also produced a vast archive of information about the colonized population: :V;];'■ within two decades it had amassed alphabetized file cards, with photographs and a range of information, for two hundred thousand individuals, around 70 percent of the city's population.88 Nevertheless this system—with its photographers, clerks, policemen, and intelligence officers—reminds us that technologies were not free-floating and their use was directed and determined by human choice and agency. Of course, one of the great underhistoricized stories of imperial systems of communication and transportation is that colonial bodies were the raw materials that enabled the creation of these systems of connection. Industrial capitalists deployed indentured workers, new migrants, low-caste laborers, and seminomadic tribespeople to fell timber, drain swamps, and reshape the land to make way for the highways of empire: telegraph lines, railway routes, road networks, and port facilities. It was primarily nonwhite workers who did the heavy lifting of empire, who carried out the most arduous and debilitating tasks. As a result of their position in racialized hierarchies of labor, nonwhite workers were most vulnerable. They were most often the bodies felled by diseases like cholera and influenza, which trains and steamships carried across borders and oceans at astonishing rates of speed. This is to say nothing of the ailments, chronic and otherwise, produced by proximity to the raw materials and by-products of industrial production, including dust, splinters, and fumes. As substances such as these entered the bodies of workers, they gave the incorporation of industrial-imperial modernity a whole new embodied set of meanings.89 While imperial power remained grounded in the ability of the colonizer to deploy the disciplinary power of violence (or its threat) against the colonized, the mechanisms of colonial governance, the ways in which imperial trade was conducted, and the nature of the imperial imagination were reshaped by the exploitative possibilities offered by industrial technologies and the truly global reach of capitalism. Here we outline the ways in which some of these transformations TONY BALLÁNTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON unfolded, paying close attention to questions of time and space, coercion and consent. Our analysis begins by sketching the growing convergences between empire and industry before examining the divergent patterns of technological development in three empires: the British, the Japanese, and the Ottoman. We argue that technology was fundamental in determining the actual shape and organization of imperial regimes, as well as being at the heart of the debates over the political, moral, and spiritual consequences of empire building. We then of- :: fer some reflections on the uneven nature of these integrative forces, stressing the ways in which imperial networks and cross-cultural connections produced differential outcomes and new inequalities. Wherever possible we seek to under- i stand the cultural consequences of such unevenness on the ground and how common people, especially colonized workers, shaped the material and symbolic forms that global technological modernity assumed in the context of empire. This section concludes by highlighting some of the unexpected consequences of these new forms of imperial connection in a range of domains, from religious practice to the history of disease. We stress a key political consequence of the 5 integrative work of colonialism and communications, the globalization of the nation-state model, placing particular emphasis on the roles of technology and ■ mobility in naturalizing the nation as the primary unit of unit of political organization on the global stage by 1914. Canals, Commerce, and Communications The 1860s saw a striking convergence between technological change, commercial expansion, and empire building. Even as European colonial authority was called into question by recurrent crises—most notably in the Caribbean, New Zealand, and Canada—imperial commercial and communication systems expanded, realigning economic and political activity. In the 1860s telegraphs, railways, and steamships became routine elements of imperial activity as they assumed greater significance after the uprising against British rule in India in 1857—1858. These technologies were prominent in discussions of the causes of the rebellion and weaknesses of the colonial state. And they were fundamental to the reconstruction of British authority in the wake of rebellion, as private contractors and the state itself undertook massive construction projects, rapidly expanding both the EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL telegraph and rail networks. This rebellion revealed that colonial regimes needed to develop swift means of communication and extensive transport networks to enable the effective deployment of military resources. In light of this, many colonial states worked hard to extend the infrastructure of rail lines and stations, telegraphs and telegraph offices, roads and bridges, that was increasingly central to their power. As such, technological breakdown, when it occurred, stymied even the most phlegmatic of metropolitan observers. As the London correspondent for the New York Times wrote in June 1895, "Not a word has been obtainable during the week about the Russian invasion of Manchuria. There are no telegraphs anywhere near, it is true, but we ought to have had news of some sort by this time, unless it is being officially kept back." Palpably frustrated by the breakdown of information technology, the Times lamented this "tax upon the public patience" of those eager for news of Manchuria's fate.'0 At the same time, European empires developed increasingly dense and extensive commercial, communication, and transportation linkages that knitted together distant ports, markets, and way stations. France, for example, extended its imperial commerce as it forced Saigon to open to imperial trade in i860; and as France asserted its authority over Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China during the 1860s, it increasingly controlled trade between these regions in key commodities such as rice. French communications networks expanded rapidly, creating an alternative set of linkages between London and Hong Kong in 1863 and extending France's commercial connections in northeast Africa, Arabia, and Persia. New companies and initiatives also pushed imperial influence and European enterprise into the Middle East and parts of Africa. In 1864 both the French Messageries Imperiales and the British Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) opened new services that linked Cape Town to Aden. Across imperial systems, a range of new port facilities and dock companies emerged; rapid development expanded the capacity of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Karachi, and Yokohama, establishing a new commercial matrix that would shape global enterprise up to World War I and beyond.91 The important technological advances that improved the efficiency of steamships, increasing their cargo capacity while markedly reducing their fuel use, were an important spur for these innovations. It was the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, however, that was both a potent symbol and a foundation of the reworking of imperial communication ■[ 35* ]■ -[ 353 ]' ■ j. TONY BAILANTYNZ AND ANTOINETTE BURTON and transportation in an age when the reach of European power became truly : global. In 1854 Ferdinand de Lesseps, a former French diplomat, obtained a con cession from Said Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, to create a company to ) construct a canal between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Suez on the Red ,! Sea. Working with plans created by Austrian engineer Alois Negrelli and financed by French capital, de Lesseps oversaw the eleven-year construction project, which j relied heavily on forced labor drawn from Egypt, North Africa, and the Arab world. Despite initial international skepticism about the project, the canal provtd . „t{ a great success after its opening in November 1869 and quickly became a vital ! commercial and strategic corridor, allowing ships to move between Europe and Asia without circumnavigating Africa. IniSys the British government, with fund- j ing from the Rothschild bank, purchased Egypt's share in the canal after Mu- i hammad Said Pashas successor, Ismail Pasha, was crippled by debt. Britain's ex- penditure of four million pounds sterling reflected an awareness of the canal's significance for the British economy and empire: although the Liberal press of British provinces was critical of the investment, Britain's new stake in the canal was celebrated by conservative commentators and most colonial opinion mak- '■. ers, who saw the canal as an imperial highway, even though the majority of the !; canal's shares remained in French hands. For British observers, the canal itself- jj became an embodiment of modernity—a monument to the power of engineer- | ing and capitalist financing—that stood in stark contrast to an Egypt that was \. seen as unable to achieve full modernity because of the weight of its ancient heritage and the supposed effects of Islam.52 |; The Suez Canal greatly reduced transportation times between Europe and Asia, as it effectively cut the distance between London and Mumbai by 41 \ \ percent, London and Colombo by 36 percent, and London and Singapore by ! 29 percent.93 The resulting growth of shipping in the Red Sea revived old ports ■1 "}■ and energized local markets. The canal was also central in imperial strategy and I" international diplomacy. British strategists believed that the canal was central in I securing the "safety of the empire," as it allowed the quick deployment of mili- j. tary resources. This meant that the Suez Canal as well as Britain's naval bases in ! the Mediterranean and the Red Sea remained central in British imperial strategy j until World War II (and beyond). The canal, which had a telegraph line running ' i! alongside the waterway, was also central in communication from India to Britain. EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Sir Richard Temple, former governor of the Bombay Presidency, noted that this line meant that "in a few minutes intelligence is flashed across the intervening oceans and continents, deciding the profit or loss on critical transactions."54 The importance of the canal and its telegraph encouraged entrepreneurs and imperial speculators to develop schemes for the construction of a canal and telegraph network across the Central American isthmus in the hope that it would be another lucrative conduit for global trade and a new communication route that might further advance American as well as British and French interests. Although the Panama Canal was not completed until 1914, from the 1870s it captured the imaginations of financiers, who set about developing elaborate plans for the construction of a complex communication network combining telegraphs, rail lines, and the canal. A concession for the construction of these linkages was granted by Peru in 1874, some six years before de Lesseps oversaw the initial unsuccessful attempts to excavate a pathway for the canal in 1880, reflecting the growing belief that the Suez Canal was a template that could be replicated to imperial benefit elsewhere.95 As this suggests, the success of the Suez Canal was not only central in recalibrating space and time within the French and British empires but also pivotal in reshaping commerce and communication at a global level. The construction of the canal marks an important rupture in maritime history: it reconfigured the sea-lanes and transformed the nature of ships themselves. It stimulated shipbuilding and further tipped the technological balance toward steam. From the canal's opening to 1914, maritime technology underwent a remarkable transformation as wooden-hulled sailing ships, which still dominated the worlds' oceans in 1870, were quickly displaced by iron-hulled, and then especially steel-hulled, steamers. Advances in industrial metal production encouraged these shifts, but they were also spurred by the peculiarities of the canal and their effects on shipping patterns. In particular, the unreliable winds of the Red Sea and the high price of towing within the canal meant that it really functioned as a conduit for steam-powered ships only. The sinking of the French barque Noel, the first sailing vessel that entered the canal, was a portent of the demise of the sailing ship on the oceanic routes between Europe and Asia.*' Moreover, in enabling the fast passage of vessels over great distances, the canal cemented the primacy of speed within shipping industries, a further nail in ■[ 354 ]• •[ 355 ]' TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL The opening of the Suez Canal, 1869. For contemporaries the canal was a powerful demonstration of the ability of European powers to accelerate travel and tighten economic connections. The canal helped to boost the dominance of steam power and British maritime ascendancy. (Getty Images) the coffin of the clipper ships that were still akey feature of "Eastern trade" in 1869. By the middle of the 18703, steamships were carrying the vast majority of high-value commodities (such as tea, ginger, and cotton) as well as a growing percentage of bulky lower-value commodities (such as rice and jute). They were also forging new commercial linkages, being used in the importation of refrigerated meat from Australasia and Argentina ro Britain and Europe, a trade that shaped the economic development and environmental transformation of Argen- ■::;^§|||fe { 356 ]- i tina, Australia, and New Zealand for at least a century. This lucrative trade, which meant that these lands developed as farms for empire, is just one example of the ways global trade grew and diversified between 1869 and 1914. In 1913 world trade had grown to ten times what it had been in 1850, stabilizing at a level that would remain fairly static until the outbreak of World War II. In fact, in the early twentieth century, long-distance shipping was extremely efficient and affordable: in 1910 the average price of long-distance freight was 20 percent lower than had been in 1869 and one-third of what rates would be in 1920. It is very important to note, however, that the canal did little to benefit Egypt itself. Even though the canal project stimulated urbanization and commercial growth in the Suez Isthmus and encouraged the growth of local road networks, the wealth generated by the canal mainly went to Britain and France, and ultimately the canal impeded rather than helped Egypt's economic development: this engine that recalibrated the geography of empire actually marginalized Egypt even as it made the region central to international communication.57 Not surprisingly, given its material and symbolic importance as a key global node of power and circulation, the canal became a key site of contention in international rivalries, especially during times of war. During World War II, Axis airpower in the eastern Mediterranean effectively blockaded the canal between 1940 and 1943, forcing Allied ships to travel around the Cape of Good Hope, significantly disrupting the movement of troops, arms, and supplies. At the same time, Allied forces worked hard to shore up the canal's defenses, deploying elaborate networks of searchlights to mislead and disorient Luftwaffe bomber crews. Equally importantly, however, the Suez Canal was the site of worker protest and nationalist agitation in the heady days of 1919 and after, when foreign canal workers and union supporters with anti-British sentiments combined to make common cause in ways that alarmed British imperial officials at the highest levels, including General Edmund Allenby. Striking workers alarmed the French and British alike precisely because they exhibited an inter-ethnic solidarity energized by Egyptian nationalist forces. What resulted was nothing less than "the birth of a workers' revolution in the midst of a nationalist revolution."'8 •[ 357 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Communications and Force The interconnected developments of the Suez Canal and the global dominance of the steamship were key in securing British paramountcy before World War I. The global reach of the Royal Navy was a fundamental element in Britain's ability to hold an expansive maritime empire together, but its dominance on the seas also reflected its domination of steamship production. Between 1890 and 1914 Britain built two-thirds of the world s ships. Britain in effect controlled the production of the bulk of ships for other nations, and itself possessed the world s largest commercial fleet.'9 British naval power was vitally important in protecting long-distance trade networks and existing colonies, but it also enabled the growing reach of British power. In Africa, side-wheel survey ships and small steamers as well as gunboats were the instruments that enabled British traders, missionaries, and military expeditions to penetrate beyond the narrow littoral that had been the normal domain of European activity before the 1880s. At the same time, the rapid expansion of the submarine cable network between 1870 and 1914 was a key structural development that underwrote the rapid expansion of British authority and reshaped the nature of colonial power. Coastal telegraphs and telegraph stations were increasingly central to British imperial strategy in Africa after the humiliations of the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879. In response to the lobbying of politicians and merchants in the settler colonies, a transpacific cable between Canada and Australasia was also connected, part of the drive to construct an "all red route"—a communication network entirely under British control—that encircled the world. But the growing reach of telegraphic communication was slow to constrain the actions of imperial proconsuls on the frontiers of empire. The new medium did not fundamentally recast the Colonial Office's bureaucratic procedures, and "men on the spot" on the frontier proved adept at crafting telegraph messages designed to win authorization for their own actions and policies. In many ways the telegraph's impact was stronger in the commercial and cultural domains, where it was a ubiquitous element in the emergent news services and patterns of journalistic exchange that were central features of the imperial press system that emerged from the 1870s.100 The impact of the telegraph on the domain of culture anticipated some of the main consequences of the rise of radio during the first part of the twentieth century, as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) emerged as an important cohesive force that informed Britons about the colonies as well as linked disparate parts of the empire despite the differences of race, language, and accent.101 Although these forms of communication and connection were fundamentally important in threading together the constituent parts of imperial systems, we must remember that all empires ultimately rely on the deployment of force (or at least the threat of force). From 1870, Britain and other European powers harnessed industrial technology to military uses, discovering that the application of science and technology could produce increasingly fast, powerful, and efficient killing machines. World War I was a horrific staging of the destructive capacity of these new technologies, as machine guns, tanks, and chemical weapons were key elements of the battlefield repertoire. But some of these technologies had been deployed on colonial frontiers in the previous decades. Most notably, the Maxim gun—a state-of-the-art belt-fed machine gun capable of firing five hundred rounds per minute—emerged as a potent weapon in "little wars" that were fought on colonial frontiers, where small British forces sought to imprint their authority over large areas and the substantial armies that tribal leaders could muster. This weapon was routinely deployed after its first use in The Gambia (1888) and was pivotal in the spectacular victories of British forces at Shangani River (1893) and Omdurman during the reconquest of the Sudan (1898). At Omdurman, Field Marshall Herbert Kitchener's forces, who had traveled to the battlefield on river steamers and by railway, met a much larger Sudanese force armed with rifles and a large arsenal of artillery; but the rapid fire of the machine guns deployed by the British infantry and on gunboats gave the British a decisive advantage. C. A. Bayly has reminded us that British global power ultimately rested in that nation's ability to kill imperial rivals and colonized peoples, an ability that was increasingly underpinned by industrial military technology.10* The London-based poet Hilaire Belloc famously satirized the centrality of military technology—and white imperial self-confidence—to British paramountcy: "Whatever happens, we have got / the Maxim gun and they have not."103 But metropolitan authorities knew only too well that superior military technology was no guarantor of imperial success on the ground, as Zulu strategic brilliance under Cetewayo and Boer guerrilla warfare two decades later so palpably demonstrated. •[ 358 ]• ■[ 359 ]" TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON An early Maxim gun operated by the British Royal Navy during the Transvaal, or First Boer, War, 1S80-1881. This weapon was both a potent agent of colonial domination and a symbol of the confluence of industrial technology and imperial might. (Private Collection / Ken Welsh /The Bridge-man Art Library) After 1870, steam and electricity were also central to the economic development of all British colonial economies. In Britain's tropical colonies, railways were crucial instruments for accessing valued commodities and bringing finished goods and labor to the large port cities that were vital nodes in the imperial system. In India, massive rail networks connected even the smallest market town or resource bulking-point with the imperial economy. At the same time, the railway emerged as an important strategic tool in the "Great Game" with Russia in the northwest of India and Central Asia. India's railway network was seen as a vital tool in combating the growing reach of Russian imperial power in Central Asia, influence that was embodied in the extension of its Caspian and Trans-Caspian Railways. This Indian system, which eclipsed the size of the British metropolitan network in 189s, ■[ 36o ]■ EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL was well known for its technical sophistication, its impressive bridges spanning South Asia's large waterways, and its strict management. As Manu Goswami has pointed out, while the colonial Indian network connected interior commercial centers to the coast, its lines often cut across existing routes and lines of movement, supplanting some well-established market towns and important waterways.10'1 As a result, new patterns of intra- and interregional economic inequality were produced, and these quickly solidified around the iron arteries of empire. These transformations underscore that Britain's investment in India's railways reflected a deep-seated desire to reorient India's economy outward and was central in reconfiguring a sophisticated textile exporting economy into a key source of raw materials and as outlet for British-made goods. Conversely, Britain's African colonies (with the exception of South Africa) had sparse and undercapitalized networks that were developed much later than India's. In some notable instances, such as the development of the African copper belt in the early twentieth century, new rail networks were constructed to connect mines to key ports. Generally, however, these lines were expensive and inefficient. Tropical Africa was never welded as firmly into the British Empire (or any European empire) as India was.105 For Britain's settler colonies, railways were powerful engines for economic advancement, encouraging the extension of cultivation and settlement by colonists as well as connecting farms, mines, and goldfields in the interior to port cities and the imperial economy. In Australia the expansion of railways enabled the conversion of the grasslands of southeastern and southwestern Australia into grain-growing regions for export. Farthet north in Queensland, the limited number of navigable waterways, a sparse transportation network, and a lack of capital for wharf development constrained the expansion of the sugar industry in the final third of the nineteenth century. These impediments were largely removed with the extension of the rail network in the first decade of the twentieth century.106 The extension of rail was also a high priority for the development of New Zealand's colonial economy. New Zealand's main rail network effectively connected major ports and urban centers, but even in the late nineteenth century, travel to and from many smaller provincial towns relied on local roads punctuated by dangerous river crossings and mountain passes. These technologies were also central in the consolidation of political affiliations, especially in the settler colonies that were granted responsible government •[ 3<5i ]■ I. TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON in the mid-nineteenth century. Railway politics were the backdrop for Confederation in Canada in 1867 and remained a crucial point of alliance building and conflict as national politics took shape. In New Zealand, the expansion of the railway network and the lucrative benefits that flowed from state contracts were a powerful centralizing force after the abolition of the provinces in the 1870s, but provincial loyalties remained strong until the early twentieth century. Across the Tasman Sea in Australia the strength of the states, which had constructed self-contained communication networks, inhibited the development of deep national cultural connections and a coherent national identity. The Australian colonies had cooperated in establishing interstate telegraphic communications from 1858, but developing a coherent national rail infrastructure with a common gauge was a slow and difficult process.107 While these nationalizing projects helped consolidate distinctive colonial forms of cultural identification, there were also strong connections between work, technology, and the emergence of new political ideologies. In Dunedin, an early site of industrial development in Australasia, railway workshops were key sites where new progressive labor ideologies were formulated by workers, but these visions of work and socialism were couched in a language of "brotherhood," which marginalized the sisters and mothers of the workers, women who themselves were precocious advocates for women's suffrage.108 Many of the leaders who harnessed this language in national politics, and as the underpinnings of New Zealand's pioneering social reforms at the turn of the twentieth century, also were key architects of anti-Asian legislation, championed New Zealand's imperial ambitions in the Pacific, and supported initiatives designed to crush the power of Maori healers and prophets. In New South Wales, railway technologies also bonded communities of railway workers in highly gendered ways, with women, mainly workers' wives, expressing a marked distaste for the grit and grime of "the iron horse"10' Railway politics also became the subject of intense racial conflict. In late nineteenth-century New Zealand, influential Maori leaders attempted to prevent the extension of the rail network into regions where Maori still retained effective control of resources and the land, revealing a strong awareness of the connections between communications, capitalism, and the effectiveness of colonial power. Meanwhile, the vast local labor forces mobilized by the British in South Asia proved adept in challenging the aspirations of British managers EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL and contesting their working conditions. These workers drew upon a range of tactics, including dictating the length and rhythm of labor, using petitions and letter writing, declaring informal "go-slows" or formal strikes, and fleeing worksites at the outbreak of disease or in response to shifts in managerial expectations.110 Questions of race were also central in the organization of labor aboard steamships. By the early twentieth century, maritime labor opportunities within Euro-American empires were increasingly closed off to nonwhite workers. The economic advantages and sociopolitical alliances that sailors of Asian and African origin had enjoyed a century earlier were systematically undermined at the end of the nineteenth century. A new racial order was calcifying where shipowners, maritime bureaucrats, and officers wove together the languages of race and gender to justify the exploitation of nonwhite workers and their increasing economic and political marginalization. This process was not restricted to shipboard life alone, but was also made manifest in legislation that was designed to constrain both the mobility and the citizenship of nonwhite maritime workers.111 The Politics of Connectivity In light of these developments, it is hardly surprising that the growth of colonial communications occupied a central position in British discourses on empire. Cecil Rhodes, whose career was built around an enthusiasm for railway building as well as the wealth generated from mining, argued for the construction of a "Cairo-to-Cape" railway under British control: this scheme foundered on logistical problems and a lack of official enthusiasm, but Rhodes's vision was a telling instance of how deeply technology and imperial thought were interwoven by the close of the nineteenth century. J. R. Seeley, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, clearly articulated this imbrication in his famous lectures published as The Expansion of England (1883). Seeley argued: "Science has given to the political organism a new circulation, which is steam, and a new nervous system, which is electricity." These technologies, he argued, required a fundamental reconsideration of imperial organization: "They make it in the first place possible actually to realise the old Utopia of a Greater Britain, and at the same time they make it almost necessary to do."112 The growth of telegraph, steamer routes, and •[ 363 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL railways as arteries that fed an aggressively expansionist imperial system meant that by the 1880s the globe had emerged as an obvious level for British political analysis. Although Seeley s vision of an integrated global British state was never achieved, his work articulated the recalibration of British thought and theory by the application of industrial technology to imperial development. What the imperial men who oversaw these developments could not perhaps have anticipated was how women would appropriate them to fuel their imperial ambition. Mary Kingsley's exploration of Africa, famously captured in her 1895 book Travels in West Africa, depended on steam power not simply as a mode of transport but as the very platform from which her imperial ethnography was launched. Her trip from Gabon up the Ogooue River was crammed with observations of the flora, the fauna, and "black deck-passengers galore," with whom she mingled with a combination of unease and excitement. Her description of the nocturnal routine of the ship is worth quoting in full: Silence falls upon the black passengers, who assume recumbent positions on the deck, and suffer. All the things from under the saloon seats come out and dance together, and play puss-in-the-corner, after the fashion of loose gear when there is any sea on. As the night comes down, the scene becomes more and more picturesque. The moonlit sea, shimmering and breaking on the darkened shore, the black forest and the hills silhouetted against the star-powdered purple sky, and, at my feet, the engine-room stoke-hole, lit with the rose-coloured glow from its furnace, showing by the great wood fire the two nearly naked Krumen stokers, shining like polished bronze in their perspiration, as they throw in on to the fire the billets of red wood that look like freshly-cut chunks of flesh. The white engineer hovers round the mouth of the pit, shouting down directions and ever and anon plunging down the little iron ladder to carry them out himself. At intervals he stands on the rail with his head craned round the edge of the sun deck to listen to the captain, who is up on the little deck above, for there is no telegraph to the engines, and our gallant commanders voice is not strong. While the white engineer is roosting on the rail, the black engineer comes partially up the ladder and gazes hard at me; so I give him a wad of tobacco, and he plainly regards me as inspired, for of course that was what he wanted. Remember that whenever you see a man, black or white, filled with a nameless longing, it is tobacco he requires. Grim despair accompanied by a gusty temper indicates something wrong with his pipe, in which case offer him a straightened-out hairpin. The black engineer having got his tobacco, goes below to the stoke-hole again and smokes a short clay as black and as strong as himself. The captain affects an immense churchwarden. How he gets through life, waving it about as he does, without smashing it every two minutes, I cannot make out.113 Though this is scarcely the Utopia of Greater Britain that Seeley and his kind imagined, the image of Mary Kingsley sharing tobacco with the African engineer surely suggests the possibility of whole new worlds of encounter, contact, exchange—not to mention a historically unprecedented variety of worldly confidence unique to the late Victorian imperial feminine traveler. White women throughout the British Empire capitalized on the opportunities that technological advance proffered in more ways than one. Like the young Miss Golightly of Anthony Trollope's 1857 novel, The Three Clerks, they were minor but significant investors in railway stock. Add to this George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)'s investments in, and profits from, companies like the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, and we appreciate the embeddedness of the world of literary culture in trajectories of empire, as well as the role of middle-class British women in the imperial corporate economy.114 Over and above the way rail and steam fostered more mobility for affluent women from the later nineteenth century, "world" travel quickly became an essential dimension of the "New Woman." The new mixed and public spaces of the railway car and train platform were a major source of anxiety about gendered modernity, for colonized and colonizing patriarchs alike. As in the Jim Crow South, they were viewed as nothing less than vehicles for the "miscegenation of modernity."115 And yet women traveled. Of particular interest in the British imperial context is the way white settler women capitalized on these new opportunities, traveling from Sydney and Wellington via Colombo and Aden to Britain and consolidating their sense of themselves as imperial subjects in the process. Their voyage "home" to London also often cultivated in them a sense of feminist internationalism, enabled by networking in the metropolis and across the Pacific world—experiences that brought them into contact with Aboriginal and Asian women under the aegis of global sisterhood. In this sense, rail and steam allowed them to claim what '[ 364 ]■ •[ 365 ]• TONY DALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON they viewed as their racial destiny—citizenship in the world—even as their encounters with activist women black, yellow, and brown unsettled notions .if colonizer and colonized and required that they understand how and why t ľ world of women tilted as much on a Pacific axis as it did on an imperial one. Japan's Railway Imperialism Railways, telegraphs, and steamships were central in imperial orders between the i86os and 1945, whethet these were long-established imperial states thai exercised authority over a contiguous landmass (such as the Ottoman Empire, Qing China, or imperial Russia) or maritime empires where one state exercised authority over a range of colonies (for example, the British, French, and Japanese empires). Building on our earlier discussion of the place of technology and transport in British expansion, we extend our analysis here to an assessment of the development of these systems of connection within two other imperial regimes, which contrast with the British case. Where Britain possessed a longstanding and resurgent maritime empire, our first example, the Japanese empire, was the product of a condensed process of industrialization and aggressive territorial aggrandizement. Our second example is the Ottoman Empire, the most durable of the Muslim "gunpowder" states, which directly confronted the extending reach of European imperial aspiration and influence. Our discussion focuses on how these communication and transportation technologies were implicated in imperial rule, the various ways in which they shaped the basic contours of imperial economic relationships, and their centrality in determining relationships between various empires. In the British case, the rapid proliferation and extension of these networks built upon earlier imperial foundations and were molded by complex economic traffic between established colonies, new imperial frontiers and zones of influence, and the imperial metropole itself. Conversely, in the Japanese case, empire building developed within a context of rapid political change, the beginnings of an economic revolution, and extensive experimentation with new technologies. But the links between new imperial aspirations and railway policy were nonetheless crystal clear, if not from the start of the Meiji period, then certainly from the end of the century— so much so that a Tokyo magazine writer in 1899 could observe almost casually, *j EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL r ■ 1 "the means of extending one's territory without the use of troops ... is railway ,. »116 ■ policy. ; The emergence of such conviction about the efficiency of railway imperialism ! is instructive. In the wake of the "opening up" of Japan's ports through the force of American guns and diplomacy in the later 1850s, Japan abandoned the sakoku (seclusion) policy that had been a foundation of the Edo shogunate. The fleets of "black ships" that Commodore Matthew Perry brought to the Japanese coast in .! July 1853 and February [854 triggered a mix of interest and alarm among the Japa- nese elite. The "gifts"—a variety of state-of-the-art weapons, telegraphic equip- j ment, a small-scale but functional steam train, and a circular section of rail—that Perry offered the emperor were a potent demonstration of Western industrial ', prowess and American military might. Japanese officials, who had exhibited a long-standing interest in Western medicine and technology, studied these objects closely; scholars and military men debated their value and produced detailed ! sketches of the operation of a Colt revolver and a cavalry rifle.'1' Immediately after Perry's initial visit, a range of bureaucrats, warlords, and & scholars based in the various political domains that made up Japan explored the If " possibilities and implications of Perry's "gifts." An important set of plans was drawn up for the establishment of an institution that would guide Japan's exploration of new industrial and military technologies, the Bansho Shlrabesho (Office for the Investigation of Barbarian Books). This center for learning was directed to assess the military strength, technological development, and strategic aspirations of Japan's rivals, as well as to translate books on "bombardment," "fortifications," "building warships," "machinery," and "products." The establishment of the Bansho Shirabesho initiated a substantial reorganization of knowledge production within Japan and of Japan's engagement with the world. Attempts to develop new forms of knowledge gained greater purchase after the Meiji restoration in 1868, which centralized authority and allowed the construction of nationalized knowledges that were directed by state impetus and oversight. The development of new communication and transportation systems was a key component of the Meiji state's attempts to build a "rich country, strong army." From the moment of Perry's arrival, Japan had experimented with telegraphic technology, and by 1895 more than four thousand miles of lines and a complex network of telegraph offices had been established. With British assistance TONY BALL ANT YNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON and capical—shaped by a desire to secure its position as Japan's key trading partner—the first Japanese railway line was opened in 1871, linking Tokyo 10 the port of Yokohama. Between 1872. and 1911, the Meiji state oversaw the building of a large and increasingly sophisticated rail network, while local entrcipre-; neurs established numerous local light-rail lines. The construction of these networks drew heavily on foreign-produced locomotives, expertise, and capital; but i local experiments with steam and rail continued at a steady pace. After the outbreak of World War I, rail development was increasingly driven from within la-pan. These transportation systems connected with a host of ports that were se? <■ cc! by a range of international as well as Japanese shipping companies, such as the Mitsubishi line, which increasingly asserted dominance over the expan<. ,1«-coastal shipping network at the same time as it established new connection :o Hong Kong and other regional hubs.118 The extension of these networks was a crucial element in the nationalization 5 of culture. They promoted the movement of individuals and ideas, facilitated die | dissemination of state ideology, and reinforced new ideas about "Japanesenc;->" as a modern identity. As in Europe and the United States, the urban commuter I railway served as the nexus between residential development, work, and leisure, integrating masses of people into a new social and cultural order. In Japan as elsewhere, it could be a site of commercial exchange, an opportunity for sex 11 d encounter (wanted and unwanted), a subject of literary preoccupation, and a site of political protest. The dialectic of intimacy and alienation was, it seems, a c mi-mon, if not a global, effect of modernization via railroad. As a major force in the imperializing of Japan beyond its "national" borders, the rails had a unique capacity to conjure imperial identity as well. Processes of assimilation and iden 1 ■ li ;: cation via the railroad had particular impact on those territories that had boon integrated into the Japanese state only in the Meiji period, such as the Ryukvu Archipelago (including Okinawa) and the "land of the Ainu" (Hokkaido). 0..i.e these regions were incorporated into the state and discourses on national cult ..ie,: j peoples like the Ainu and Okinawans were increasingly seen as "backward" e .■-ments within the nation, rather than as "foreigners": this in turn reinforced r'-;-desire to modernize these communities and their environments, drawing then: f§ ever more firmly into the fold of an industrializing nation. Clearly, modern f. Is -nological innovation was essential to the workings of racialization through which EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL metropolitan Japanese pathologized internal others (the Ainu) and proximate others (the Chinese). Not only that, but even with the railways, travel could be hard, accommodations primitive, and national prestige fragile. This was what the Japanese traveler Ogoshi Heiriku learned on a fin-de-siecle trip to Manchuria— where, he discovered, Japanese were still not allowed to travel on Russian trains.119 Beyond the boundaries of the nation, new technologies and communication networks were equally important in the Japanese drive to remake its place in the world. Colonies and resource frontiers were of special economic value to Japan, given that the Japanese archipelago had a finite amount of agricultural land, limited natural resources, and a dense population. Until the conclusion of the ■Sino-Japanese war in 1895, Japan had been self-sufficient in one key commodity: ; coal. But the depletion of Japanese coal stocks due to the growth of its factories and furnaces during that conflict meant that it was increasingly dependent on coal sourced from Manchuria, Korea, and Sakhalin Island. It was hunger for this 'energy source for industrialization that helped stoke Japanese imperial interests in north Asia. Korea and Manchuria became primary sources of high-quality coal for Japan's growing industrial sector.110 As it attempted to secure its interests in these regions, Japan quickly asserted its control over both communication and transportation networks. Even before Japan formally annexed Korea, the Japanese controlled the major commercial and military rail lines that made up the peninsula's rail network. During the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, Japan ; monopolized Korea's road network to serve the ends of military transportation and, reflecting an awareness of the military value of telegraphy, seized control of i Koreas telegraph system. These networks were ultimately integral to the maintenance of Japan's authority in Korea after it was formally annexed in 1910. Interestingly, opposition to railways in Korea tended to focus on the ways in which /Japanese rationalization worked, and it came from Japanese settlers and Korean ; collaborators, who sought a greater role in management and supervision. They staged a sit-in in 1903 and effectively won the competition for freight when the Railway Bureau conceded them a virtual monopoly in the transport industry.121 Manchuria was of particular importance in Japan's economic development and the region was a quintessential "railway colony"—a phenomenon that conjures the "binary mode of territorial and informal colonization" characteristic of Japanese imperial governmentality in unique and spectacular ways.122 The South ■[ 368 ]■ ■[ 369 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON Manchurian Railway—a key transportation route and conduit for comirten c and communication—was the heart of japans enterprise. The extension and improvement of the line enabled it to carry high-density traffic and was a powerful stimulus to mining and manufacturing: as a result, the region quickly 1 u-came a key supplier of raw cotton and iron ore. The Japanese state and entrepi<'-neurs invested heavily in the venture and reaped substantial profits. The railwcj company also supported a wide range of research activities, and Manchuria w.n : seen by the Japanese as an important frontier where ideas about race, cultuic, and environment could be tested and experiments into new processing and manufacturing techniques could be carried out. Significantly, it was the site of investment also for the Russian Empire, which had been instrumental to its initial construction—and of popular hostility as well. Hence the attempts of the Boxers, with the help of the Qing court, to destroy the railway line and prevent father Russian military encroachment. Indeed, railway sabotage was crucial to t he Boxer Rebellion, which included the murder of European railway engineers and 1 missionaries proximate to the fray. Thirty years later, in 1931, the Guangdong i army detonated the railway track near the Chinese military base in Fengtian, an j act that inaugurated a dramatic and prolonged firelight along the South Man • : churian Railway, which Japanese readers followed with intense interest in the nations newspapers as the fate of rail lines and the direction of the war hung in the balance.113 With time, Japan's colonial holdings became increasingly important: they accepted growing amounts of Japanese exports, were dominated by swelling;-populations of Japanese officials, merchants, and settlers, and were crucial to ■ sustaining the metropole itself. This was particularly true in terms of staple crops: in 1910 Korea supplied Japan with seventeen thousand tons of rice; by the mid-i930S this contribution to Japans food supply had expanded to 1.5 million tons as colonial authorities pushed the extension office cultivation and became more aggressive in their expropriation of the crop. In a similar vein, the combi- ; nation of technological advancement and imperial expansion created the condi-tions for the rapid creation of a large pelagic fishing enterprise that was funda- S mental in supplying a key element of the Japanese diet.124 Japanese administrators believed that colonies should be harnessed to serve metropolitan economic interests. To these ends, Japanese colonial rulers worked 5 EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL !V hard to effect wide-ranging transformations in supposedly "underdeveloped' regions that had been incorporated into the empire. In the Liaodong Peninsula in northeast China (which was under Japanese rule from 1905 to 1945), Japanese rulers not only attempted to impose their authority (suppressing local "bandits") and secure peaceable relations with local populations, but they also encouraged the expansion of cultivation, the transfer of technology (especially with relation to farming), and the expansion of the market. These innovations were underpinned by a desire to make the peninsula a productive part of the empire and j ! were driven by a colonial regime that excluded locals from the political process . , and made ready use of the coercive power of the empire. But even as the products of the peninsula were drawn into an increasingly rapacious imperial economy, ' i the improved rail networks, the deployment of new technologies, and the appli- : cation of fertilizer meant that the region's productive capacity eclipsed that of ■ § other parts of China. This transformation was a clear sign that China's waning " rt political power and economic frailties were connected to its belated and partial i ' attempts to grapple with the new industrial technologies championed by both f its European and its Japanese rivals.1"5 Japan's recognition of the value of communications technology reflected the rapid transformation of its military power and strategic interests. In the Japanese case, there were close connections between industrialization and the rise of imperial aspirations. The desire to establish Japans credentials as a modern nation and a power on the international stage were important stimuli to the extension of its economic influence and territorial reach. Technological development was an important precondition for the rapid expansion of its military capacity during the Meiji period and its military successes against China in 1895 and Russia in 1904. From the late 1860s, Japan invested heavily in developing its military capacity within a new industrial framework: drawing upon Western scientific models and making extensive use of foreign experts (from Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium), new furnaces, arsenals, shipyards, and drydocks were constructed. By the mid-i88os, the Japanese were no longer producing wooden ships and had successfully established factories that were producing large numbers of explosives, artillery shells, machine guns, and large cannon.126 In turn, the success of the Japanese military in these conflicts against China and Russia stimulated the development of new technologies and was a powerful •[ 370 ]• •[ 37i ]• TONY BALL ANT YNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON spur co the extension of industrial production. Wars against China and Russia i ^ as well as the Meiji state's "strong army" policy, provided sustained impeius i-o Japan's shipbuilding, production of armaments, and development of miidimc • tools. In the wake of its victory over China, influential Japanese military Icadms and politicians increasingly argued that military technology, especially nz\A\ \ technology, was fundamental to Japan's future. These officials appealed to n - m tionalist sentiment and imperial aspirations, as they argued Japan had to develop a potent blue-water fleet, not only to ensure national security in age of aggressive; •. ' European colonialism, but also as a foundation for Japan's status as a regional power. Some of these concerns echoed contemporary developments in Germany. -Li In the final decades of the nineteenth century, an influential cohort ofpoliticia.i ■ and officials argued that, given Germany's growing industrial might, a strong : navy was vital to the nation's future, especially to avoid being eclipsed by its Eu:o- i pean rivals. Naval power was seen as essential if Germany was to build an empi i i outflank its European rivals, and compete with Britain on the world stage. Ihe construction of a strong German navy was also seen to have real political betii - x| fits. As a truly national institution, it would not only protect the recently con- 3;; solidated German nation but also stimulate a patriotism that would help the ^-^l Germans foreground their common nationality and transcend religious and re- ■" J gional divides.127 I In Japan, where strong arguments linked sea power to the standing of the ria- :\;S| tion, the state's embrace of technology and its commitment to the development of its military capacity sowed the seeds for the Japanese navy's spectacular rout o!" the Russian Baltic Fleet in May 1905. The development of Japans military capacity before 1914 further laid the foundation for the transformation of the Japanese economy in the interwar period, which saw the rapid expansion of Japan's indus- ' f trial capacity, the refinement of its military technologies, and the growth of new forms of enterprise, especially in heavy industry and chemical production.128 Japan's expanding industrial and military capacity, as well as its growing influence on the world stage, colored its perceptions of the peoples and lands in Asia and the Pacific. During the Meiji and Taisho periods, Nan'yo—"the South Seas"—were actively reimagined as an important space for Japan's future by various intellectual and political figures. The southern Pacific was seen as a site for potential Japanese emigration, a region where Japan could acquire territory ant' EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL enlarge its standing as an imperial power, as well as a largely untapped resource frontier brimming with valuable materials that could be easily exploited by the resource-poor Japanese state.129 In 1915 the South Seas Association was established with government backing to promote the expansion of Japan's economic and cultural presence in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Japan enlarged its interest in the region after it gained control of Micronesia during World War I. Japan's expanding presence in these western Pacific islands was championed by the navy and was considered to be of great strategic value in the 1930s, as Japan was increasingly mindful of its strategic position relative to the United States. In these southernmost portions of the empire, advocates of Japanese imperialism believed, Japan was ruling over people who were radically different in cultural and racial terms. Whereas Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese populations under Japanese rule were seen as belonging to the same broad cultural group, the peoples of the island Pacific were believed to be extremely primitive and, as such, required strict rule and extensive indoctrination in "civilized" values consonant with imperial citizenship.130 These islands were connected to Japan and its colonies: shipping routes, newspapers, and radio circulated images of these distant lands and peoples back to Japan, while these media were also central to the imperial project of fully integrating these islands into the mesh of empire. By the 1940s, on the international stage Japanese ideologues and diplomats increasingly articulated a vision of their national and imperial future as being based in a "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere." This was to be a regional economic complex headed by Japan, which would free Asians from the threat of European and American imperial aggression. It is crucial to remember, however, that this distinctive vision of the international order was underpinned by the transportation, communication, and political networks japan had fashioned in northern, East, and Southeast Asia and the western Pacific and ultimately reflected the confidence Japan had gained from its industrialization and the rapid extension of its imperial reach from the Meiji period on. Ottoman Innovation and the Tracks of Empire Japan's transformation between the 1850s and World War I was a powerful and attractive model for many intellectuals and reformers in the Ottoman Empire. ■[ 373 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Japan's new standing on the international stage suggested not only that modernization could progress at considerable pace, but also that European power could be successfully challenged by non-European states. Many Turkish military leaders drew particular inspiration from the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1904-1905, believing that Japan demonstrated that technological expertise and military prowess could be gained without comprising distinctive moral and social values.131 For these Turkish thinkers, industrial development, military improvement, and the strength of connections between the constituent parts of the Ottoman Empire were important issues that would define the future of their community. Unlike Japan, however, the Ottoman state exercised authority over a long-established empire; it had an extensive history of cross-cultural contacts; and it did not have the buffer of the open ocean protecting it from its rivals, as the sprawling Ottoman domains shared borders with a range of the empire's European rivals and their colonial possessions. In other words, the contingencies of geography and history gave questions of industry and empire a particular inflection in the Ottoman world. While the question of the Ottoman Empire's relationships with Europe was a central issue shaping the development of its communication and transportation networks, these technologies were also seen as an important instrument for ensuring the integrity of the empire, for the promotion of trade and exchange, and for enabling the mobility of troops, administrators, scholars, and pilgrims. Although by 1847 Sultan Abdiilmecid I saw the possibilities that telegraphy offered state practice, the first substantial Ottoman lines developed during the Crimean War as part of a coordinated effort between the British, French, and Ottoman regimes. Despite the sultan s enthusiastic support of the new technology, the pashas of the Ottoman provinces, who were fearful that it would allow the Ottoman center to develop a more detailed knowledge of local affairs and strengthen the power of the sultan at their expense, initially opposed it. Despite this, the Ottoman telegraph network quadrupled in the 1860s to encompass over fifteen thousand miles of line in 1869. Growth of this network not only linked key political and commercial centers within Ottoman domains, but it was also shaped by the influence of British capital and strategy, as lines that traversed the Ottoman lands were designed to connect to British India, reflecting the strategic value placed on telegraph communication in the wake of the 1857-1858 rebel- lion. In addition, in certain parts of the Ottoman Empire—especially in Hejaz and Yemen—Ottoman communications were still routed through British-owned lines and stations in British-controlled Egypt. This dependence was cast off with the inauguration of a new and extremely expensive network that linked all the major administrative centers in the Transjordan region in 1901. The main line was subsequently doubled and new stations were added to the network as Sultan Abdiilhamid II was impressed wirh the efficiency and strategic value of the new lines. But the sultan's opponents also seized on the political utility of the telegraph network. Provincial townsfolk and merchants used the new technology to swiftly communicate their petitions to Istanbul, and the reformist Young Turks saw the telegraph as an important instrument for the reform and modernization of the Turkish nation. Women telegraph operators were among those who filled the streets of Ottoman cities, taking part in and helping—through shopping, looking, and riding the streetcars—to shape the character of secular public life.132 Railways were even more significant than the telegraph in Ottoman attempts to modernize. By 1850 the Ottoman state was aware of the challenges that the rise of steam power and European industrialization posed, and embarked on a concerted effort to harness the empire's coal resources to supply its growing factories, its imperial fleet, and the fledgling rail network that was inaugurated in 1856. Railways were of particular significance within this large land-based empire that incorporated a wide variety of environments and widely dispersed markets. The massive capacity of trains pulled by steam locomotives meant that a significant long-distance trade in grains developed and the agricultural potential of the fertile regions in the interior of the empire could be effectively tapped for the first time. Lines were constructed to serve both commercial and strategic concerns. The Oriental Railway, which connected Istanbul to Sofia and Edirne, and Edirne to Salonica, in the 1870s and 1880s, linked key imperial markets. In a minor but telling example of the interconnection of production and transportation and its gendered character, the development of rug factories in Turkey was accelerated by the incursion of the railway into the interior—which in turn stimulated employment for women, albeit of the low-paid variety. But the actual routing of lines was dictated by strategic concerns and the desire to be able to deploy the empires troops quickly and effectively. Railway projects were also ■[ 374 ]• •[ 375 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL heavily symbolic. In 1900 Sultan Abdiilhamid II announced the construction of a new rail line that would run from Damascus to Medina and Mecca, a massive project designed to enable pilgrims on the Hajj to reach Islam's sacred cities and to demonstrate the sultan's commitment to the ties of faith and culture that co-. ; nect the Muslim world. This project reflected a general Ottoman strategy to . <.-sociate the railway and telegraph, which some Muslim critics dismissed as products of the infidel, with the authority of the sultan and the maintenance of Islam i itself. In stunning contrast, it was against the backdrop of a train station in Cairo in 1913 that Huda Shaarawi launched her anti-veil movement, therebv! dramatizing, if only by allusion, the contrast between the mobility of modernity and the fixity of harem as emblems of Egyptian women's particular colonial and nationalist dilemma.153 Despite the emphasis that successive Ottoman rulers placed on the railway, the Ottoman network ultimately developed slowly and unevenly. At one leve1 this reflected the varying economic capacity of the regions and the differential ■ rates with which Ottoman subjects embraced rail travel. The lines in Anatolia* and the Balkans were relatively heavily used both by passengers and for freight, i whereas the railways in Arab domains did not carry large volumes of either. Overall, however, the Ottoman rail system was relatively underdeveloped. The | network was based around a limited number of trunk lines and not the kind of dense mesh that characterized British India or even the proliferation of feeder lines found in many other colonies and in the European lands that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. Concentrated networks did develop in former Ottoman domains, such as Egypt, and some feeder networks developed around ports like Beirut and Izmir, but generally it was a "thin" system that had only moderate reach into the imperial hinterland. Indeed, the lateness of trains ana the general inefficiency of modern transport were not uncommonly satirized in the early twentieth-century Ottoman press. At the outbreak of World War I, the ; network remained patchy in both quality and covetage. During the war tin-Turkish army frequently faced persistent logistical difficulties as the rail network had limited reach across Anatolia and stretched only forty-five miles east of Ai 1-kara. The gaps within the system meant that soldiers had often to rely on camels, boats, and their own feet as they moved to marshaling points and engagements. These limitations did not, however, prevent the Ottoman authorities from carry- all (t,g out a program of Armenian "relocation," which authorized the deportation <)f Armenians and the seizing of their property, as Armenians were identified as a threat to the security of the empire. Eyewitness reports testify to the role of the Baghdad railway and its staff in this genocidai drive to redefine the ethnic composition of the empire, a project that culminated in the extermination of over one million Armenians.134 While the patchiness of the Ottoman transportation networks contributed to the eventual dissolution of the empire, ultimately the nature of Ottoman eco-1nomic development was the primary cause of the hollowing out of centralized authority. The extensive public works programs that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century were an important engine of economic development. Significant advances were made in the development of communications technology, steam power, factories, and new machinery, but these innovations were unevenly distributed in the empire. Economic modernization was produced at greater speed in larger cities, but these technologies had much less impact in provincial towns and among the large peasant population that was the demographic backbone of the empire. Most importantly, the pattern of development was dictated by the Ottoman's dependence on international funding and scientific innovation. Much railway construction was reliant on foreign capital: German capital was particularly important, financing the important Anatolian rail line. Ottoman infrastructure and industrial capacity increasingly fell under European control as well: European financing was also central in developing ports, tram networks, and factories.135 At the same time, the growing numbers of steamships visiting Ottoman ports and the expansion of rail networks meant that Ottoman markets were increasingly opened up to European goods: regions like Syria were flooded by European-produced textiles at the end of the nineteenth century. This reliance on imported finished goods was compounded by the opening of the Suez Canal, which enabled vast imports of silk from the Far East, undercutting the production of Ottoman silk at centers such as Bursa. These transport networks also meant that the Ottoman Empire was increasingly locked into a European agricultural market and basic agricultural goods made up around three-quarters of the empire's exports.136 In other words, Ottoman workers produced basic foodstuffs and raw goods for export to the industrialized nations of Europe, while Ottoman •[ 377 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL consumers increasingly purchased imported processed foods (such as refined flour and sugar), manufactured goods, and luxury products. In light of this pattern, by 1914 the empire "assumed the character of a European economic appendage."137 Because of this economic decline, the attempts of successive sultans to build military capacity and establish a state-of the-art navy (which included a submarine from 1886) foundered. The dream of rapid modernization and imperial strength that Japan offered was unattainable for the Ottoman state, and the ultimate failure of Ottoman industrialization was made clear with the empire's dissolution in 192.1. Remaking Time and Space If we shift our gaze beyond the development of individual imperial systems to focus on the broader development of these connective technologies, it is clear that from the 1860s imperial regimes worked hard to make their communication and transportation networks larger, denser, faster, and more efficient. Steam power and electricity drove environmental transformation, the extension and intensification of industrial production, and the expanding investments in military technology that were common features of imperial regimes between 1870 ; and 1945. But the nature and outcomes of these transformations were irregular. The empires' wire and steel networks, which knitted the continents together, were extended at different speeds and transformed various regions in different ways. Both geography and economics shaped these patterns. Regions that had few: natural anchorages or insufficient resources for the construction of artificial harbors, or were too distant from high-traffic shipping lanes, developed fewer port facilities and benefited much less from international trade. This was particularly the case in Africa, where high-quality ports were developed only in regions that were firmly incorporated into European empires and where substantial capital had been invested in port infrastructure. While Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and South Africa had several significant ports each, most large cities in tropical Africa either lacked natural harbors or drew insufficient capital from their imperial masters for the development of high-capacity port facilities.138 Railways did become important elements in African colonial culture, but the continent's rail networks lacked the quality and density of South Asia's. Railway development in •[ 378 ]• Africa was patchy, in both coverage and the successful execution of projects. Railways were rarely constructed to serve African communities or to link major population centers; instead they were instruments that allowed valuable raw materials—rubber, cotton, copper, gold, diamonds, and groundnut and palm oils—to be moved from the interior to port cities from where they were shipped to European markets.133 These patterns meant that even as Europe's intrusion into Africa was geared to the expropriation of African resources, Western technology and culture were never as deeply embedded into many local cultures as they were in those colonies where colonial rule was accompanied by a dense mesh of new communication networks. But in light of this we should not read Africa, or even tropical Africa, as a unique case: instead we should remember that the work of empires was always asymmetrical in its nature, producing spatially and socially differentiated outcomes. One of the most important of these outcomes was the reconfiguration of time and space. It is well established, of course, that industrialization transformed European experience and understandings of both space and time. There is strong evidence that the growth of European productivity was the outcome of a reorganization of labor and time from the middle of the eighteenth century. New industrial technologies also reshaped popular understandings of time as European workers increasingly internalized the disciplines of clock time and factory whistles. Most importantly, the steam locomotive and the extension of rail networks revolutionized European and North American apprehensions of speed and distance as old perceptions of space, formed by an earlier and longstanding technological order, were torn asunder by the power of steam. Train travel and the increasing acceleration of other forms of communication—from the electric telegraph to the daily newspaper—led to a widespread sense that industrialization had resulted in what contemporaries termed the "annihilation of space and time," seemingly reducing distances and bringing points in space closer together with great speed.140 The globalization of steam-powered travel on the back of imperial systems meant that from 1870 most societies in the world were exposed to these cultural shifts. Even in Africa, which as we have seen had relatively small, patchy, and slow communication networks, the technologies brought by colonialism did reconfigure space. The trip from Mombasa to Uganda, for example, traditionally ■[ 379 TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON may have taken up to a year to complete on foot, but in an age of train travel, it could be completed in two to four days.141 In those parts of Africa where there were few or no railways, another industrial form of transportation—the bicycle— became a key feature of the colonial landscape for colonial rulers and African, alike, achieving some acceleration of social movement but with little attendant recalibration of temporal perception.142 Another important marker of the shifts in temporal perception that empite and industrialization wrought on the world stage was the globalization of the pocket watch and the growing dissemination; of this technology beyond the European and North American middle classes \ to their counterparts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Perhaps the most telling evidence of how the combined effects of industrialization and empire building reordered temporality was the standardization of time at a global level. The United Kingdom was the first country to impose .: standard time system. With the growth of rail travel, there was a greater need to \ organize time to ensure the coordination of the movements of trains and to ' guarantee the accuracy of timetables. By 1855, most public clocks in Britain were set to London's Greenwich Mean Time. This standardization across Britain en- f couraged the commodification of time. Not only did pocket watches and family ■: clocks become more common, but time itself was a commodity The most famous time-seller in Britain was the "Greenwich Time Lady," Ruth Belville, the daughter of an assistant of Greenwich Observatory, who used a subscription ; service to sell Greenwich Time, which was calibrated on a weekly basis on her ■ fine pocket watch, to Londoners.143 It was not until 1880, however, that the legal system caught up with this pop- : ular move toward standardization with the passage of the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act. Larger nations comprising regions that significantly diverged regarding "solar time," such as the United States, faced even more serious problems. In . 1883 American railways implemented a system of standardized time zones, breaking away from the "local reckoning" that had been previously dominant, but it was only in August 191S that Congress passed the Standard Time Act. In 1884, long before the US government adopted a standard national time, forty-one delegates from twenty-five nations met in Washington, DC, for the International Meridian Conference. The speed of telegraphic communication and steamships had made it clear that international standards for the measurement of time and •[ 380 ]■ EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL space were needed, and the conference fixed an international meridian and international time zones. This issue was particularly pressing for large maritime empires, which hoped that the standardization of time would aid the daily function of commerce and imperial administration. The conference delegates agreed that Greenwich, which already functioned as Britain's standard-setter, would serve as a global meridian and that all longitude would be calculated both east and west from this meridian. Thereafter, Greenwich Mean Time functioned as a global baseline from which international time zones were established, creating a unified system that has become the international standard. As the measurement of time was standardized, the conviction that imperial centers represented both the present and the future, whereas colonized spaces represented backwardness and the past, not only persisted but was strengthened. The technology of the daguerreotype in particular and the apparatus of modern photography more generally enabled cultural difference to be coded visually into scenes of apparent temporal distance, enhanced by "native" costume and nakedness either total or partial. Women and children were the invariable (though by no means exclusive) foci of these forms of appropriative technological innovation, even when colonized men were in charge of the lens. With the arrival of moving pictures around the turn of the twentieth century, the capacity for time to mean space, for the past to mean the remote, was at once accelerated and fixed for metropolitan audiences increasingly desirous of evidence of their own racial and civilizational superiority in a post-1918 world. If the difficulty of Britain's victory over the Boers by 1902. and Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 were not evidence enough, the critical support provided to the allies by troops of color in World War I and the fevered nationalist movements at Versailles spoke volumes about the finite global possibilities of modern imperial power. By the interwar period, would-be imperialists who wanted "native views" could have them virtually, beyond the constraint of time and space, via film. Though the movies certainly delivered colonized spaces and people from myriad perspectives, among the most common was via the view from the steamboat or the train window.144 Indeed, apprehensions of space and more particularly of scale were transformed by industry and empire as the linkages that technology aspired to create came into more widespread view. Most importantly, the completion of the Suez Canal and the paramountcy of steamers reconfigured space, giving rise to a new ■[ 38i ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON geography of shipping, as ports developed to meet the needs of expanding longdistance shipping and were themselves reconfigured by steam power, iron, and concrete. New ports sprang up and were built on a grand scale by imperial rulers confident of the further growth of shipping in the age of steam: Singapore, Hong Kong, Dakar, and Karachi became significant hubs. Port Said, at the entrance of the Suez Canal, emerged as the world's premier coaling station for steamers, but other ports, like Montevideo in Uruguay and Las Palmas in the Canaries also rose in economic and strategic significance because of their new prominence as refueling sites. Steam eroded the significance of some long-established ports: after the Suez Canal opened, Calcutta was increasingly overshadowed by Mumbai, and increasingly the commercial and political weight of British India moved gradually toward rhe west and its premier port.145 Just as locomotives and steamships effectively compressed space as they greatly reduced travel times, various social groups also experienced the compres- :■■ sion of space differently. Some colonized communities who lived in close proximity to new transportation networks were unable to access them because of their social status, long-standing economic marginalization, or a recent decline in their standing.146 This divergence was made especially clear in some colonial cities, where the physical organization of space and its attendant social morphology was fundamentally shaped by the locations of rail lines, stations, wharves and the factories that supported these industrial transport technologies. Laura ; Bear's work on the culture of Indian railways has demonstrated the ways in which i these new technologies and their associated labor patterns were central in creating new and highly spatialized hierarchies of race and gender. Disciplining the . railway family was a crucial dimension of the railway colony project, not least because the spaces it gave rise to rendered unstable both racial distinctions and, : therewith, that most prized of imperial exports, domestic respectability.147 The:1 conjunctures between communication networks and the geography of cultural ;: difference were striking features of newly established port cities such as Suva in Fiji as well as in long-established cities like Lahore in Punjab and Ajmer in a Rajasthan, which were profoundly reordered after their incorporation into the : colonial rail network. In these cities, the railways had a transformative power, shaping patterns of industrialization, residential development, and the organiza- : EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL tion of public space. Indeed, imperialists from Korea to Cairo saw the railroad itself as the model colonizer, delivering the civilizing mission via modern technology while stoking the extractive colonial economy as well.148 Thus the "annihilation of distance," or at least the greater speed of movement and communication experienced by most societies by 1900, had a variety of unexpected consequences. The transport networks constructed by colonial states, which were typically committed to modernization and imperial strategic interests, were a key factor in the popularization of pilgrimage. According to a popular early twentieth-century railway song in Japan from the memoir of Japanese poet Takamure Itsue heading to Shikoku on pilgrimage, "when you ride this train you'll go a thousand ri in just an instant."149 Rail quickly also became central in the local, regional, and interregional journeys to sacred sites and temples that were a central element of South Asian religious practice. Some railway lines were routed so that they effectively served pilgrimage sites, and by the third quarter of the nineteenth-century railway travel was firmly embedded within the pilgrimage experience of many South Asians. This new form of transport encouraged the faithful to undertake more long-distance pilgrimages, prompted more women to undertake pilgrimages as they saw trains as secure and reliable, and in effect reshaped the frequency, quality, and organization of ritual activity within South Asia as a whole. In a similar vein, new technologies and imperial transportation services helped bring about the end of the traditional Hajj, which had relied on long-established overland routes, caravan transport, and the use of sail power where necessary. The crossing from the ports of Egypt and North Africa to the Hejaz were always a feature of the movement of pilgrims toward Mecca, but in the age of steam many of these crossings were reduced from over thirty days to just three. The increased speed of this crossing encouraged, in turn, an increase in the number of travelers making the journey. Interestingly, Nawab Sikander Begum, hereditary ruler of the state of Bhopal who traveled to Mecca with a retinue of hundreds in 1863-1864 and published her account in 1870, chose not to mention the part of her journey traversed by rail, and scarcely mentioned the sea journey either. In addition to accelerating the movement of pilgrims, steam power also reordered traditional routes. Jidda, on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast, emerged as the key gateway port in the age of steam and the city was transformed ■[ 382 ]■ •[ 383 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON by the new status and commerce that it enjoyed. European steamship compahic s serving such ports made handsome profits and were keen to increase the volume of traffic from imperial ports and cultivate the popularity of pilgrimage.150 The modern Hajj brings us to another key consequence of the reordering of time and space. The increased volume of pilgrims and the growing numbers tr»\ -elingfrom India's Ganges Valley, where cholera was endemic, not only had devastating effects on the population of Hejaz, which was increasingly exposed to the disease, but also caused widespread concern among European imperial powers. In light of a deep-seated fear that Europe would be devastated by an epidemic carried by pilgrims, international conferences were called on the Hajj and European powers worked with the Ottoman authorities to regulate the movement of pilgrims and the sanitary regimes to be implemented during the Hajj. These conferences reflected contemporary awareness that imperial networks became key vectors through which environmental transformations were enacted as they stitched together previously disparate lands and communities. Road networks, which were increasingly extensive in most frontier regions, facilitated the flow of seeds and weeds along multiple vectors. There was nothing new in this, as roads had been central agents of epidemiological integration in Eurasian history, but these imperial networks connected inland communities and frontier zones to an increased number of market towns and port cities, linking the most distant settlements into a "common market" of microbes produced by large-scale imperial formations and long-distance trade.151 Most importantly, bicycles, trains, steamships, and automobiles allowed pathogens to move across space at greater speed, fundamentally reshaping the epidemiological profile of many diseases. The biological consequences of the suturing of these transportation technologies into imperial networks was well demonstrated by the great epidemics that shook the world in this period. The 18 89-1890 influenza pandemic moved quickly across the globe, spreading at great speed through the dense rail networks of Europe and North America. The new railworks and steamer connections fashioned by empires allowed this disease to reach out into more distant lands: colonial port cities like Tunis, Cape Town, Algiers, and Hong Kong were key nodes from where the virus spread out along local shipping lanes, roads, and rail networks. Those regions that were only lightly integrated into imperial networks were EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL largely inoculated against the virus. In Eurasia the influenza largely moved from west to east and, given the shape of routes in Eurasia, moved slowly across the eastern frontier of the Russian Empire, moving very slowly toward Siberia and delaying its arrival in Manchuria and Korea, The connections between imperial transportation and the movement of disease were even more forcefully demonstrated with the influenza pandemic of 1918. As War World I drew to a close, large numbers of soldiers, sailors, and military workers were transported from combat zones to their homelands. These travelers carried the virus—which had taken root in the battlefields of Europe as the war came to a close—along rail and steam routes to every nation that supplied combatants. The efficiency of these forms of transport meant that the virus subsequently spread out to those countries and communities that had little or no connection to the conflict. Because of the extended reach of steamships, in the American colony of Guam, the French colony of Tahiti, and Western Samoa (which was under New Zealand's jurisdiction from the end of the war) indigenous communities suffered extremely high mortality rates.152 Meanwhile, in British India the relationship between railways and the dissemination of disease was subject to frequent discussion: there was strong evidence that plague traveled along railway routes, a point highlighted by a range of Indian nationalists.153 Gandhi's Traveling Incarceration Among the most strident critiques of the consequences of empire and industrialization was Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, drafted in 1909 and published in 1910.154 Presented in the form of a dialog between Reader and Editor, Gandhi offered his scathing critique of "civilization" and "colonialism" through the voice of Editor. Editor argued that railways were a key component of the "disease" of civilization and were an instrument that "had impoverished our country." He suggested that they were not "gifts" but rather colonial tools that helped cement Britain's "hold on India." The rail networks had not elevated India, but instead had caused misery: they increased the frequency of famines, carried germs from place to place, and destabilized the social order by breaking down the "natural segregation" that had previously shaped Indian society. In short, railways were •[ 384 ]• •[ 385 TONY BALL ANT YNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON instruments of evil, allowing "bad men [to] fulfill their evil designs with greater rapidity." This recalibration of time had spiritual and moral effects: "Good ti a\ -els at a snail's pace."155 Gandhi's infamous encounter with the physical and social limits of the Sv.t regated railway carriage in 1890s South Africa reminds us that the new cultural and technological order crafted by colonial regimes was never passively accepted, rather it was subject to appropriation, frequent challenge, and open resistance; This can be clearly seen in the Ottoman Empire, where symbols of Westernization were both criticized and physically attacked. For example, an anonyrfnu* Ottoman-Turkish text, probably drafted by a minor religious thinker from tiii provinces toward the close of the nineteenth century, railed against West c.ri, schools, factories, railways, and telegraphs. The author was especially critical of these new forms of mobility, suggesting that they allowed humans to achiew their desired goals with less effort, time, and thought. As a result, these technologies encouraged humans to undervalue experience and to develop conceited souls as they became dependent on created things rather than on God, becamej caught up in worldliness and desire, and cast aside the truths of the Quran.';. 1 hi social and religious consequences of the adoption of these technologies introduced into the Islamic world by "unbelievers" were far-reaching: in fostering human arrogance and the negligence of sincere devotion, they gave rise rospin-tual disobedience, widespread sin, and the total corruption of the moral order."* Yakup Bektas had shown that this kind of position was common among those Ottoman subjects "skeptical of the Christian-Western world" who viewed .lie telegraph as "an infidel, Satanic invention." This critique rejected Western technology on the grounds that it had a demoralizing effect, but also because "the telegraph entailed a spatial framework that contrasted with the traditional \ic\\ of geographical space and distance."157 Other Ottoman opponents of Westernization relied on physical rather t.-.iti textual resistance. The expanding telegraphic network was subject to attack ii many rural areas as poles were removed and materials were stripped, reflecting." mix of ideological opposition to the new technology as well as a local hunger for J scarce raw materials. As a result, the Ottoman government implemented a systems of annual subsidies to chieftains who undertook to prevent these abuses of iliej system as well as establishing special guards (favuslar) to protect the netwoi.e is a ■[ 386 ]• IEMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL whole. This initiative, however, was unable to suppress hostility toward Western f' technologies in southern portions of the empire. The extension of railways under ! ^e Ottomans and the new centrality of steam transport in the movement of pil- • .rrims angered Bedouin tribes whose livelihoods had long been dependent on , providing camels to pilgrims. Resentful of their constrained economic prospects .jid the Ottoman states withdrawal of a subsidy to protect pilgrims, Bedouins .bse up in open revolt in 1909. These same groups subsequently provided crucial support to the Arab revolt against Ottoman authority in 1916, an uprising that Ibcused much of its attention on attacking the Hejaz Railway.158 Nationalist critiques of innovations in imperial communications also reveal the connections between communication and the growing naturalization of the nation-state. Even though empires constructed global networks, some imperial thinkers were encouraged to consider the possibilities of constructing global states, and nationalist ideologues frequently drew inspiration from other critiques of colonialism, the primacy of the nation-state was finally secured in the second half of the nineteenth century. The transference of these industrial technologies and the creation of new communication networks were central in giving shape to colonies within the putative form of the nation-state. Benedict An-I derson has famously drawn our attention to the pivotal role of newspapers in j producing imagined communities, though even these depended on other tech- |gl--- nologies (especially the telegraph and railway).159 1 Nations were not simply produced by the circulation of cultural representa- B*- tions, but were also molded by the shape of transportation and communication pathways along which commodities, capital, and workers moved on a regular basis.160 A crucial precondition of the process of nation building was the lacing 1 ■ together of preexisting regional economies, and railways in particular were cen- tral in giving economic patterns a national shape. Railways not only recalibrated I * trade in key commodities within regions (such as the rice trade in Bengal) but were simultaneously central in the production of a national market for food grains in colonial India. The integration of transport netwotks was often central Ik,' in the political process of nation building: this was particularly clear in Nigeria, where the linking up of the previously distinct railroad systems in the north and rfie south preceded the political fusion of the protectorates and functioned as Ith e primary means of colonial state formation. •[ 387 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON Not only did rail and telegraph networks provide the core spatial structure for many nations that came into being under colonial regimes, but they were ah.. fundamentally important in the cultural processes that helped naturalize the nation-state as a political unit and fortified the large-scale identifications th.n are required for nationalism to successfully take root. Even as they were criti:al of the many of the outcomes of railway construction, Gandhi and other nationalists saw the railways as an indispensable instrument for their cause and a ci u-cial element in the unification of an extremely diverse population into a coherr -1 citizenry. It is also clear that in settler colonies, railway journeys and the emergence of popular commercialized leisure were central in producing emerge r.t ideas of colonial citizenship, fortifying new understandings of race, landscape, and nationality.161 In other words, transportation and communication were pivotal in producing the symmetries among economic organization, political identification, and cultural cohesiveness that were central in the production of the nation-state. The centrality of these technologies at a global level by 1900 helps-explain not only how the idea of the nation-state was globalized but also why the content of nationalisms were remarkably consistent in widely different colonial contexts. Even as nationalist leaders insisted on the uniqueness and difference of their communities, they did so through idioms and narratives that shared many common features. As early as 1914 imperial globalization had arguably cemented the authority of the nation in the non-Western world at the same time as a conflict between European powers quickly transformed into the world's first truly global conflict waged with industrial technologies. In light of the evidence we have presented here, we are wary of attempts either to disentangle empire and "globalizing forces" in this period or to bind them too tightly together. This wariness stems not from a conviction that all globalization was imperial in its nature, but rather from historical evidence that over the course of five centuries the shape of the various global overlays—communication and transportation networks, flows of capital and commodities, missionary institutions and pilgrimage routes, the movements of scholars and the printed word— had been molded by the boundaries, ideologies, and practices of imperial regimes in a host of ways. Moreover, not only were forms of interregional connection operating from the 1870s on, conditioned by these structures fashioned in earlier imperial moments, but they were constantly being remade by new imperial aspi- i: EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL ■■rations, international conflicts that were threaded through with imperial concerns (even when they were not necessarily imperial in nature), and by the efforts of various individuals and groups to overturn, resist, and subvert the march of empire. In an age of global imperialism, the world was continually remade by these struggles, and its hegemonies were never either self-evident or complete, in the sense of being finished in time or total in space. Empire and globalization were not synonymous, but the processes of empire building and the weight of imperial legacies gave shape to the connections that linked regions, communities, and states into new and often unexpected forms of connection and interdependence. This threading together of human communities raised questions about identity and difference in new and pressing ways: even as the economies and infrastructures of nations were increasingly interwoven, nationalist leaders insisted on the uniqueness and particularity of their political community. Ironically, of course, these ideologues articulated these supposedly singular identities through a common set of images, objects, symbols, and narratives. As will become clear in Section 3, questions of space, political change, and transnational connection were at the heart of the struggle over the politics of empire and imperial power across the first half of the twentieth century. Whether via contact or collision, contemporaries were able to see, to appreciate, and to act on such linkages because of the structural transformations sponsored by technological development, new patterns of circulation, and ongoing processes of cultural transfer and adaptation in a world that had been radically, if unevenly, remade by global imperial systems. ■[ 388 ]• ■[ 389 ]• EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL 3. Global Empires, Transnational Connections IN APRIL 1955, representatives of 19 independent Asian and African countries convened in Bandung, Indonesia, in "the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind."162 Sponsored by the recently independent nations of Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan, Bandung became shorthand for Utopian hopes about the future of "Third World" solidarities in the wake of decolonization and in the context of the Korean War and the superpower ambitions of the Soviet Union and America. Although Bandung took place a decade after the end of the period we are discussing, scholars who wish to understand the full historical meaning of empire, colonial encounters, and decolonization must account for how and why African-Asian solidarity and nonalignment became watchwords of the postcolonial Cold War—as well as how anti-imperial movements structured the histories of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using Bandung as a touchstone serves several meth-odological purposes. First, it allows us to center the history of anticolonial activists and movements, big and small, at the heart of our account of imperialism during this period, a period that is often framed as a story of imperial growth and decay where the key players are European or American and where decolonization is primarily seen as the outcome of the ideological shifts and economic crises that developed in the West after World War II. Instead we see the period from 1870 to 1945, and especially the years 1918-1945, as a time when colonized peoples worked hard to wrest power and authority from imperial governments loathe to "grant" independence except when faced with the inevitability of defeat at the hands of diverse opponents, from nationalist leaders to "guerillas," from "terrorists" to those colonized subjects who worked hard to maintain their language, cultural practices, and limited political rights in the face of imperial power. Second, it enables us to appreciate the ways in which the Bandung Conference itself was the culmination of decades of transnational connection between and among colonial peoples rather than the inaugural moment of African- Asian solidarity. Rather than seeing Bandung as an originary moment, this approach foregrounds the long histories of intercolonial connection, collaboration, and of course also friction. Last but not least, thinking backward from Bandung makes it possible to track not just the flow of people and policies between metropole and colony but also the movement of ideas and political platforms below the imperial surface, if you will. It allows us to historicize the ways in which a variety of actors, nationalist and otherwise, across the imperialized crjobe of the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century linked up rhetorically, symbolically, and even organizationally. Some of these were well-known elite figures; others have become so in the context of postcolonial history; while others remain obscure, and instructively so, insofar as their histories fly below the radar even of the intersection of global, local, regional, and imperial histories. In highlighting these often-neglected "encounters" between colonized peoples, we are suggesting that the period 1870-1945 not only was a high point of imperial reach but, equally, marked the emergence of new kinds of intercolonial connections and solidarities. These new political forms were central in the global political terrain during the second half of the twentieth century and, arguably, were central in structuring the new imperialisms of the twentieth century. By figuring the Bandung Conference as emblematic of the broader reshaping of the global political order, we aim to challenge what is often, and unaccountably, viewed as a sharp break between the Cold War and what came before. At the very least we want to suggest new chronologies that, rather than privileging the "Scramble for Africa" and World War II as bookends, emphasize the 1890s and the interwar years as watetsheds in the geopolitical restructuring that enabled the Bandung Conference to emerge as a historical possibility. Needless to say, our call for the recognition of a different temporal frame—one that underscores continuities as well as fissures between the apparent chasm of the pre- and post-1945 periods—does not aim to cast doubt on the power or the historically unprecedented accomplishments of anti-imperial movements. Nor do we wish to fet-ishize the Bandung Conference itself as the apotheosis of postcolonial harmony and interracial brotherhood: there were now-famous internal currents of disagreement and dissension among the delegates and their leaders at the conference itself. Indeed, what Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia, said in his opening remarks about the relationship between the West and "the rest"—notably, that TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON "great chasms yawn between nations and groups of nations"—might just .is c i, ily have been said about the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru, the pi imt minister of India, and Zhou Enlai, premier of the People's Republic of China o between Zhou and Sir John Kotelawala, prime minister of Ceylon, over lf.nl, i ship and peaceful coexistence, particularly with respect to the conference s position on the USSR and its semicolonial satellites.1" What is significant is that such disagreements and the transnational boiuh they cut across were by no means new to the postwar world. They grew organic:1 if not necessarily predictably, out of the wreckage of older imperialisms, the coi -tests among recently postcolonial states, and the aspirations of newly energie' imperial powers—in part because they were the inheritance of the "global!, articulated imperial structure" of the mid-rwentieth-century world.164 Gcndei is an embodied experience together with the idea of "woman" as a reformist platform for the claims of imperialists and nationalists alike was critical to how :-,.,> global structures were articulated in this period. Indeed, gender s simultaneous discursive and material presence—and its entanglement with racialized ideas and practices—was a clear marker of how empire building imprinted modernity. In anticolonial thought and practice, the emergence of women as political, economic, and cultural agents in their own right occurred against a backdrop of a "woman question" that turned women and even some feminists into icons of tradition or modernity or both, despite the fact that in many cases they were in the process of forging new movements claiming rights at a global level. The Bandung Conference—with its success in bringing together ex-colonial peoples to debate the ramifications of their sovereignty and solidarity on the world stage and its virtually exclusively masculinist take on the new world order—can be read as both a harbinger of the fractious global order of the late twentieth century a* well as a key product of the global reach of anticolonial resistance to the violence and repression of modern Western imperialism. Empires Ascendant Standard narratives of the period between Henry Morton Stanley s journey down the Congo River and the height of the Great War emphasize the ascendancy or" Western European empires especially: a claim that, at a basic level, it would be EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL hard to contradicr. In terms of territorial expansion alone, a range of European powers did extend their spatial reach significantly, if not exponentially, during these years. European armies, diplomats, and adventurers succeeded in bringing a variety of social, cultural, linguistic, and religious communities under direct imperial rule (especially in Africa) or into a variety of imperial spheres of influence and informal control (especially in East Asia and Latin America). In terms of sheer numbers (whether the calculus is subject bodies or square miles), Britain outpaced its European rivals significantly between 1870 and 1914, with the result that the British imperial experience has become emblematic in historiographical terms of "the imperial encounter" tout court. If the litmus test for imperial global-imperial power is economic dominance, Britain's preeminence at the close of the nineteenth century was not challenged. At the heart of the "developing capitalist core" both in the West and in the world, Britain was undoubtedly the center of the imperial globe. Within Britain, England served as the fulcrum for industrial production and commercial consumption and, within England, London functioned as the center of a vast empire of financial services that encompassed the globe, even allowing for comparative decline after i900.1C5 Equally significant, the structural conditions that Britain had long established for realizing profits from its Asian imperial territories, where both full and semicolonial power was operative, meant that aspiring empires like Japan were compelled to grapple with British imperial foundations as they sought to enhance their own economic and territorial power. This is not to say that Japanese imperialism was merely reactive to or derivative of Western empires; instead, it was compelled to stake its claim to global power in waters—treaty port waters, to be precise—already well-navigated by European interests and shaped, at the end of the nineteenth century, by centuries of British imperial enterprise. In many respects, nations and empires aiming to be global players and to exert domination over local or indigenous peoples had first, or at least simultaneously, to deal with the specter, whether diplomatic, military, or economic, of British power. As empire building became a key marker of a nation's economic and cultural capacity, Britain, for irs part, was also faced with competitors on all sides as well as resistance from below. "The Ottoman sultan, the Meiji emperor, the Russian tsar, the Hapsburg emperor... all looked to each other to see ... [how to play] the role of'civilized monarchy'" as their respective officials eyed the others' bureaucracies, militaries, and imperial/civil societies.11'6 -[ 391 ]■ •[ 393 ]■ TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL Thus, it is a truism worth perhaps repeating: imperial "encounters" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurred on multiple fronts, engaging colonizer, colonized, and would-be colonizer in a wide variety of asymmetrical relationships of power. These asymmetries are less visible—as indeed is the vulnerability of European hegemony—than they should be when one holds to the argument that the history of the British Empire ought to remain near the heart of global accounts of imperialism in the modern period. There is no denying, then, that in terms of technological development and economic prowess (in almost every register in which that might be assessed), the British Empire was critical to the definition, in practical and symbolic terms, of modern imperialism as such. In this sense, the appellation anglo-globalization is not without merit as a characterization of the processes that restructured many economies, polities, and cultures in the period 1870-1945 and laid the foundation of our contemporary moment.167 And yet, recognition of the British Empires centrality to the establishment of a certain species of globality need not mean that we should see British imperialism as a static, fully accomplished, or (worse yet) ideologically hegemonic phenomenon untouched by either the threat of competitors or the specter of native resistance from within. The case of the South African War of 1899-1901 is apposite here. Although the conflict fed into and was shaped by the shifting imperial alignments of Britain, France, Russia, and Germany, the war itself was precipitated by the eruption of intra-ethnic rivalries—between African groups as well Afrikaner and English colonists—on the South African frontier. When read against these multiple contexts, this fin-de-siecle contest must be understood as the result of the complex set of divergent strategic imperatives and cultural aspirations that were produced by the intersection of competing imperial visions with the complexities produced by a long tradition of cross-cultural engagement and colonialism on the ground. As the clash between English and Afrikaner armies played it, it became clear to many observers that this was not simply a small colonial war of local significance, but was rather a conflict with global ramifications.1*8 Events in South Africa not only resonated within English and European high politics, but they were central to debates over race, nationhood, and the bonds of empire throughout the British colonies. The British campaigns against the Afrikaners drew on colonial manpower, with white soldiers from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand serving alongside British troops. Even though small cliques of settler intellectuals and politicians in both Australia and New Zealand were fashioning increasingly confident nationalist traditions, the opportunity to serve the empire that the war provided was embraced with great enthusiasm . by the majority of colonists. But the desire of many Maori communities to dem- } ; onstrate their loyalty to the queen and to the empire, opened up a series of I contentious debates over race after the Colonial Office declined the offer of Maori ! military manpower conveyed by the New Zealand premier Richard John Seddon. This British decision, together with the experience of mobilizing an expeditionary force and the reality of losing soldiers in an imperial conflict, fed colonial nationalism and further militarized the culture of British settler colonies. The ! conflict in South Africa raised complex issues in Ireland, which formally remained part of the "Union" of the United Kingdom of Ireland and Great Britain, but where there was a strong sense that Ireland was in effect a British colony. Although the politicians who represented Irish constituencies in Westminster praised the efforts of the I rish soldiers who fought as part of the British war effort, there was !." : widespread agitation against British military recruitment in Ireland during the I, war. Many of the Irish settlers in South Africa fought alongside the Afrikaners against the British army. And despite its explicitly Protestant theological underpinnings, Afrikaner nationalism remained an important inspiration and reference point for Irish nationalists into the 1920s and beyond.16' [ The end result of the South African War was a pyrrhic victory for the British. Its ultimate "success" on the ground came at enormous cost, in terms of dead and wounded, capital expenditure, and with respect to imperial confidence as the new century dawned. This complex balance sheet suggests how unstable "British imperialism" actually was even at one of its most self-consciously jingoistic moments. The relatively poor performance of British soldiers in South Africa fed into a set of metropolitan exchanges about the bodily fitness of the British race, not just for global rule but also for sustained cultural reproduction. The journalist Arnold White mixed jingoism with popular science in a series of thirty-three articles in the Weekly Sun that highlighted the large number of potential recruits for the British campaign in South Africa who were rejected because they were physically unfit for service. White's fears over the future of the nation were ■[ 394 )■ •[ 395 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL widely shared. At the start of the twentieth century, Fabian socialists like Sidney Webb and the pioneering eugenicist Karl Pearson were united by their deep concern with the strength of the nation. For Pearson, who aggressively applied Darwin's idea of the "struggle for existence" to the social domain, empire building was central to the fortitude of the nation. He believed that colonialism not only allowed Britain to extend its power by defeating "inferior races" but also kept the body of the nation strong through the exertion of war. These arguments about race and nation were strongly inflected by the language and politics of gender. Even as he supported women's enfranchisement, Pearson suggested that the nation would be strengthened if traditional gender roles were reinforced: the "primary duty of the woman," he suggested, was "to rear strong and healthy children, and the primary duty of the man to carry arms in its [the nation's] defence."170 The depth of these worries over the physique and character of Britons in the wake of the war in South Africa was such that Parliament established an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904. Not was Britain the only place whete such debates wete prominent. Fin-de-siecle French fears of depopulation in this period were laced with anxiety about all manner of immigrants. These were part of a wide-ranging political discourse about the "the color of liberty," its relationship to conjugality, and its links to metissage in the Third Republic. In this same period in Japan, sex and social control were thought to be not just intimately related, but critical to imperial governmentality at the level of the reproductive body, an overtly nationalist tradition of thought that drew heavily on European and especially German scholarly and scientific work on sexuality.171 For our purposes, it is as crucial to recognize that the South African War was also a key political moment beyond the boundaries of British power. The global communication networks surveyed in Section 1 meant that news from South Africa traveled widely and swiftly. Reports on the struggles between the Afrikaners and British imperial forces were carried in newspapers across the globe and were widely debated by philosophers, politicians, and diplomats. Afrikaner attempts to tesist British dominance won support from an otherwise unlikely coalition of Russian and German nationalists, French-Canadian separatists, and prominent Marxists, such as Kail Kautsky. Seeking more detailed information than could be found in telegrams and editorials, the Russian state used the war to collate extensive military intelligence on the British army to equip itself for an A French political cartoon depicting a Boer woman enraged by the death of children at a British concentration camp during the South African War. This image, one of a series printed in the French satirical journal VAssietteau beurre during 1901, offered a scathingcritique of Btitish policy. (Getty Images) imagined future conflict. In 1899 Russia sent engineers and militaty agents to South Africa to gather information, and additional intelligence was produced by the Russian officers who volunteered in the Afrikaner armies.172 At the same time, Chinese intellectuals monitored events in South Africa in the late 1890s alongside those in the Philippines, not only because they were concerned about a resurgent "Anglo-American" imperialism but also because they understood their ■[ 396 ]• I •[ 397 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OE THE GLOBAL own global possibilities to be at stake in these conflicts. Afrikaner attempts to assert their sovereignty in the face of British imperial power were followed closely in China at a moment when the relationship between ethnicity, political power, and the nature of the nation itself were subject to an open debate that was explicitly global in its range. Afrikaner aspirations functioned as a kind of political mirror through which Chinese observers could reflect on the nature of Mari-chu authority, the ethnic constitution of Chineseness, and the relationship between politics and the state.173 This Chinese engagement with Africa, a region that had long been at the very margins of Chinese cultural and historical consciousness, reminds us of both the inescapable globality of politics around 1900 and how important anticolonial resistance was in principle and in practice to debates over the nature of the nation. Using the South African war to resituate the British Empire in the complex of nodes in which it historically operated reorients our understanding of what the global arena looked like from outside the precincts of the British imperial experience. If nothing else, it reminds us that in the last quarter of the long nineteenth century there was a host of players on the global stage jockeying for elbow room. Within this context, non-European states espoused many of the same justifications for territorial expansion as their European counterparts, and they had their eye as much on other global imperial powers as they did on the indigenous people they aimed to colonize. This understanding unseats the easy equa-tion of imperialism with Europe or the West, or indeed claims that preoccupations with cultural difference, in all its multivalent forms, were primarily or even uniquely Western phenomena. The geographies of imperial systems around 1914 cannot be forced into simple binary models. At the same time, however, it is striking the extent to which the economic aspirations and cultural logics of various imperial systems shared common preoccupations and aspirations. The Russian experiment in Tashkent is a case in point. The quest to be recognized as equivalent to the Western powers was a huge motivating factor in the imposition of administrative rule in Central Asia. Officials like Governor General K. P. Kaufman sought to impress both Moscow and Paris while maintaining authority over subject Muslim communities as he set about modernizing Turkestan. Campaigns such as Kaufman's drive to reform the city of Tashkent were at least in part designed to showcase Russia's capacity for civilizing native popula- •[ 398 ]• rions through all the canonical means: sanitation, education, and, of course, the imperially designed ceremonial occasion. As we shall see in greater detail below, the boundaries Kaufman and his successors tried to establish and the reform projects they strove to carry out met with both local collaboration and outright resistance. This evidence reminds us that the predicaments of improvement were common to features of the imperial encounter in this period, even as these predicaments played out in different ways in different locales. Meanwhile the common comparison in colonial Tashkent of Sart traders—Turkicized inhabitants of Central Asian regional urban centers—with European jews, both of whom were viewed as preternaturally unhygienic, reveals the ways in which local hierarchies of difference were laced into broader discourses on difference, which were at least in part shaped by imperial projects elsewhere. While it might be too much to suggest that pogroms and Muslim persecution emanated from the same national/ imperial cauldron, inter-imperial echoes like these must give us pause when we think about cordoning off non-Western empires from histories and theories of European nation building and colonialism. Although organized campaigns against the veil and other material expressions of Muslim identity were carried out only later by a Soviet regime determined to revolutionize Central Asia (especially Uzbekistan), women's agency was crucial to the ways in which imperial power unfolded—and was contested—in places like Tashkent well before the interwar period, where lower-class Russian women blamed tsarist officials for food shortages even as they attacked Central Asian merchants with stones on the eve of i^i7-m British power and ambition drove much of what would be considered imperial territorial aggrandizement in this period, due to Whitehall's fixation on both the long-term security of the Indian empire and the related drive to establish a corridor of power from the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean. This was globally apparent throughout the 1880s. The desire to contain, pressure, and rival Britain was clear after the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, organized by Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Germany. In particular it was a powerful spur to Kaiser Wilhelm's fin-de-siecle weltpolitik, which aimed to rival British imperial aspirations on the global stage. The German desire for imperial power drove a massive expansion in German military capacity from 1897. This was particularly focused on the navy, which Kaiser Wilhelm believed could pose a significant •[ 399 TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL threat to British power in the North Sea and could therefore shift the global balance of power between Britain and Germany. The Kaiser's weltpoiitik also catalyzed a popular nationalism that proved politically useful for elite interest groups i who hoped to secure the young nation against the threats supposedly posed by I the dangers of democratization and socialism. A small but significant number of Germans, including some influential female writers and feminists, were more broadly drawn to the idea of an aggressive German foreign policy, a stronger commitment to the Germanization of Polish regions of Prussia, and a global territorial empire.175 This kind of imperial vision was underwritten by an assumption that more territory was needed to ensure the economic security and cultural vitality of the German people. In 1904 one exponent of German empire building starkly articulated this desire: "We must have lands, new lands!"176 Of course; this enthusiasm for extending Germany's territorial reach and cultural power was to have fateful consequences for colonized peoples and the future history of total war. But the most historically accurate way to view these contests for imperial : hegemony is not simply through a competitively nationalist frame. For one thing; such an approach casts the history of imperial encounters in a purely international framework. Not only does this prevent us from understanding how deeply enmeshed the scramble for Africa was in an emerging global field of imperial power, it potentially obscures our ability to look beyond the arenas of diplomacy and the military for other sites of consequential imperial encounters. As elaborated earlier, the late nineteenth century was a moment when the spatial reach of imperial power was in the process of being consistently remapped, from the garrison to the ::>" j forest, from the mission school to the metropolitan parlor, from the Colonial Office to the compound of the diamond mine. And as we shall see, across a range of imperial regimes in this period, imperial states attempted to extend their reach into regional, local, and quotidian spaces for the sake of "civilizing" their subjects and, of course, protecting soldiers and settlers and thereby securing their hold on conquered peoples and places. Holding to the top-down, nation-state model of '-:-\ i Western imperial rivalry makes it difficult to appreciate how crucial the more local >_:A and intimate colonial encounters were to aspirations to global power. Nowhere are such designs more spectacularly apparent than in discourses and practices aimed at controlling sexuality and the body. Significantly, a major locus of these projects was the military itself, which was preoccupied with the dangers of sexually transmitted disease and miscegenation as consequences of contact between soldiers and native women. In the British imperial context this resulted in the creation of a series of Contagious Diseases Acts, from India to Queensland to the Straits Settlements. In the context of the Meiji imperial state : it meant the licensing of an official system of brothels (comfort houses) that was part and parcel of a modern imperial health regime. Some of the key principles that underwrote this regimen were articulated in the 1889 text Kokka eiseigenri (The Principles of State Hygiene) by Goto Shimpei, a leading doctor, colonial administrator, and advocate of public health. Goto imagined the Japanese state and its colonial territories as a biological entity, a body, that required careful observation and cultivation. While he encouraged individual citizens to embrace "enlightened" bodily practices, his vision required an interventionist state to assume responsibility for the creation of a distinctive hygienic modernity. This model placed significant emphasis on sexual hygiene and had profound ramifications for colonial municipal governance, the policing of cross-cultural sexual contact, and the regulation of "comfort women" into the twentieth century.1" If imperial ascendancy before 1915 meant the incorporation of territories and bodies into an increasingly avaricious set of colonial regimes, it also meant increasing "spheres of influence" as well. In this respect, the Berlin Conference did not cap imperial ambition but fed it. The 1890s witnessed the steady progress of a variety of "creeping" colonialisms. Whether it was the Japanese in Korea and Fujian, Germany in Qingdao, or the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the fin-de-siecle years saw imperial powers relentlessly seeking advantage and influence. But Italy's humiliating defeat in Ethiopia, like Spain's capitulation to the United States in 1898, made it clear that the stakes were high in the Great Game of imperial power. Nor was outward expansion the full extent of colonizing projects in this decade. Inside some already established imperial states, particularly white settler colonies, measures were also afoot to secure specifically racialized political regimes—through reservations (in the continental United States), passbook procedures (South Africa), and white supremacist legislation (the White Australia Policy of 1901)—that would solidify new forms of white privilege that had enduring power into the second half of the twentieth century. Women and children were particularly vulnerable within these racially stratified projects, and ■[ 400 ]• •[ 401 ]• TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL even as social reformers and feminists drew new attention to the "woman question" at a global level, the divergence between the opportunities and experiences ; v i |i of white and nonwhite women were typically consolidated rather than overthrown. Global histories of imperial encounters require us, in other words, to trace and to historicize imperial ambition before 1915 through a kaleidoscope of ::: inter-imperial and cross-status exchanges and rivalries. Rather than simply a (jvi:: ■ transnational emphasis, these new global histories of imperialism also necessi-t ate a multilayered, multiaxial approach for apprehending the structures of trans-imperial contact that this period set into motion. Not incidentally, such a globalized view of imperial design would have undoubtedly been clear to contemporary observers in a number of imperial and colo-nial locations. The explosion of print culture in the final quarter of the nineteenth ■": },': century enabled the apprehension of a variety of imagined communities at the doorstep of newspaper readers in Paris, Delhi, Shanghai, Cairo, Moscow, and Istanbul. The "world ofjournalism" and the growing array of genres—from "pennv dreadfuls" to missionary tracts, travel narratives to illustrated periodicals—that reached popular audiences delivered imperial encounters in all their diversity to expanding readerships, as literacy spread rapidly and became a key element of modernity. By reading the news or immersing themselves in a popular tale of empire, both male and female readers were able to transport themselves to "other places" and to learn something about "other" peoples. Printed texts brought news about distant lands and strange peoples to recently colonized peoples, who frequently assembled an image of human variation and the pattern of world history through :; simple missionary narratives, school texts, and newspaper stories. At the same time, reading functioned as an important element in the fashioning of metropolitan and cosmopolitan subjectivities as readers in major centers defined themselves in part through their imaginative encounters with peripheries, both national and imperial.178 This growing entanglement with print shaped regional linguistic traditions, national languages, and an increasingly powerful global English, which encircled the globe from Hawaii to New South Wales, Bengal to Alexandria, Wales to Jamaica. Travel writing, with all its ethnographic affect and semiscientific authority, was the most common delivery system for the making of imperial cosmopolites, whether authors or readers. It functioned among elites across empires from east to west and back again as a legitimating political and social reform vehicle— even as it worked to naturalize imperial expansion, whether Qing, French, or British.179 The details of the native body, whether male or female, offered opportunities for mapping both cultural affinities and differences in colonial space. As Arakawa Goro, a member of the Japanese Diet who visited Korea in 1905, observed after cataloging native hair, dress, coloring, and physique, declared: "if you... did not look carefully... you might think that the Japanese and Koreans are the same type of human being."180 In an interesting example of countercolo-nial flow, some Turkish and Egyptian litterateurs—like those behind the publication oFMisr al-Qahira and at- Urwa al-Wuthqa in Paris—published their journals in Europe itself, where from the 1890s Turkish journalism in particular flourished. In this way metropolitan readers of all kinds bore witness to the geopolitical realities and uncertainties of global imperial power, as did some colonial readers. When Auguste Robinet, the Algerian-born author of the popular pied-noir literary figure Cayagous, had his character meet the anti-Dreyfusard Edouard Drumont in 1898, he dramatized the proximity of colonial politics to domestic ones. He also made clear how critical both colonial opinion and the imperial encounters at the heart of business of empire building were for all groups embroiled in the drama of empire, at home and on the peripheries as well.181 Anti-Imperial Sentiment before 1915 In 1871 the existing political configuration of the French world was explicitly challenged. The Paris Commune saw a socialist government briefly installed in the French capital by workers disgruntled in the wake of France s defeat by Prussia. In Algiers, French colonists launched a republican uprising styled as the "Commune of Algiers," but their dreams of Algerian autonomy were swiftly crushed by the threat of French military power. It proved more difficult, however, to reassert French control over the rest of the country as the Kabyles, mountain dwellers in eastern Algeria, sparked a revolt against the French colonial state over incursions into their land. French imperial officials considered the ancestral domain of the Kabyles, Kabylie, to be critical in their quest for colonial resources, but equally because it offered a pedagogical lesson to colonial peoples that French territorial conquest would be total. This struggle is useful as a starting point for -[ 401 ]• ■[ 403 ]' TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON a discussion of the character and direction of anti-imperial resistance before the twentieth century. In the first instance, it reminds us of the overlap between metropolitan political time lines and colonial ones, a pattern evident certainly in the British case, where major moments in domestic political culture were often framed by, if not also tesponsive to, unrest in colonial possessions. In the French context the uprisings in Haiti and Guadeloupe that occurred in the era of t'.c French Revolution and the twentieth-centuty anticolonial movements coming out of North Africa are perhaps better known than this nineteenth-century example. Yet both Kabyl and Arab resistance in the long shadow of 1830 are clearly critical to an appreciation of the nature of changing shape of French colonialism over the longiie durée. This is especially the case as the war against indigenous populations—in the Arab case, against the Muslim leader Abdul Qadir—went on for the better part of two decades, a fact that suggests that French imperial hegemony, such as it was, was hard-won and that native resistance was tenacious and multifaceted. The Kabyl example is also useful because it represents peasant action directly responsive to land seizure and encroachment and because it did not cease with the suppression of the 1871 outbreak but continued sporadically across the rest of the century. These eruptions were typically in reaction to specific legislative enactments by the colonial state, but their effects could be fat-reaching: most obviously, the 1945 Sétif (Petite Kabylie) uprising helped to fuel the eventual Algerian wat of independence. Whether in Ireland, the Antipodes, the American West, Africa, or India in the half century before the outbreak of the Great Wat, unrest directed at the imperial state and its local representatives by colonized peasants or rural laborers accounts for a large proportion of anticolonial activities in this period, even as they sometimes laid the tentacled foundations fot anticok* nial and decolonizing struggles .m In some significant instances, indigenous peoples could oppose land policy via representative institutions. While a sequence of Maori prophet-warriors (like Te Kooti) and prophetic advocates of nonviolence (such as Te Whiti) believed that God's favor would ultimately overthrow the colonial order, other leaders like the Ngai Tahu chief H. K. Taiaroa used their parliamentary positions to criticize the operation of colonial governance and protect the interests of their communities. In the global context such formal political representation for indigenous communities was the exception rather than the rule. Of course, given gendered EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL limitations attached to the franchise in most polities, the formal political rights of colonized women were typically meager or nonexistent. But this is not to say that colonized women were not concerned with the questions of politics or engaged in political struggles. Where land was a symbol of tribal or communal unity as well as a crucial source of economic sustenance and political authority, as in late nineteenth-century Kenya, women's work could be essential in a host of domains, from livestock ownership to ptovisioning work parties to spiritual exorcism, even if there was no formal space for Kenyan women in the political process. Elsewhere women's power and authority were significantly refigured against the backdrop of expanding commodity production, as in colonial Asante. Thus, in Africa, colonized women were constantly engaged with political questions, as they responded to white government officials, missionaries, and colonial capitalists as well as to their own chiefs and elders. These multiple engagements meant that cultural visions that various groups of African women articulated frequently were ambivalent and contradictory as they tried to balance their own community's interests with the competing pressures placed on them by politically powerful groups. Their relationships to imperial power were paradigmatic, in other words, of the multiaxial encounters produced in the messy and uneven terrains of global empires—and of the routine protests against the highly gendered regimes that imperial powers put in place through policy and practice.183 In the end, the oppositional practices of most colonized subjects remained invisible or appeared inconsequential to contemporaries beyond native communities themselves. In colonial Australia, for example, Aboriginal resistance to theit dispossession was sustained and widespread, but its small-scale organizational basis meant that colonists could deny its existence and it typically remained beyond the lines of sight of officials securely based in Sydney, Melbourne, or London. But some of these very localized contests over land rights and usage sparked bloody massacres, punitive raids, and the confiscation of long-held native lands. In the Australian case, the basic freedoms of Aboriginal communities were heavily circumscribed by both state and, after 1901, federal law. At the level of the law and high politics, the very existence of indigenous communities could be denied through the theoty of terra nullius, a legitimating myth of the colonization of Australia that held that Aborigines did not work or own the land and such were a people without sovereignty or political rights.184 But on the ground in frontier •[ 404 ]• •[ 405 TONY BALLANTYNE AND ANTOINETTE BURTON EMPIRES AND THE REACH OF THE GLOBAL areas, the persistent resistance of Aboriginal communities to the rapid extension: of pastoralism and mining frequently spilled over into interracial violence and the "normalization of brutality" as an instrument of colonial control.185 Many social reformers, both in the colonies and in the imperial metropoles, decried colonial violence. Only a few commentators, however, connected wars and murder to colonialism's rapacious hunger for resources or the racial logic that underpinned colonial violence. More typically, social critics hoped to construct a better type of imperialism, one that was grounded in the cultivation of spiritual and moral improvement as well as economic advance. Essentially the hope was to redeem empire, to fashion a beneficent colonialism: this was a powerful line of ar-: gument when many supporters of empire building continued to believe that extensive territorial empires were a sign of providential favor. Harnessing native women's reproductive and productive labor to the "higher ends" of building sta-; ble families was crucial to this process of legitimation, as was the constrictive "loving protection" of those white women reformers who sought to rescue them from the grip of cultural subordination and marginalizing national policies.1 si:; Increasingly in the twentieth century, these white reformers also pushed beyond imperial boundaries to utilize the power of an international ethic of social reform, if not anticolonialism, as well. It is clear that, due in part to these routine anxieties about colonialism andi the extensive and more sensational international coverage attracted by imperial atrocities such as those enacted by the agents of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, the quest for usable resources underpinned the aggressive quest for imperial power. "Whether they were seeking essential goods like rubber from the Congo, luxuries like diamonds from the South African mines, or Aboriginal land, colonizers frequently came into direct conflict with native people when they tried to exercise authority over valued resources. For colonized populations;-the surveyor, the manager, and the merchant embodied colonial authority and: their subordination as much as the jackboot of the imperial soldier. Of course, territorial conquest and annexation are the most self-evident explanatory factors in the emergence of anti-imperial resistance, and the history of that global phenomenon in the prewar period can be readily understood as reactive in the most basic sense. When Menelik II of Ethiopia and Tippu Tip of Zanzibar repelled European incursions, for example, they did so defensively to •[ 4otí j- maintain their own power and to keep their kingdoms free from colonization, as did the African tribes who conducted the Swahili war in 1891 against the Belgians. What we might call "defensive agency" could occur on more fronts than imperial contests over territory, as the career of Zaynab (Laila) bint Shaykh Muham-inad (ca. 1850-1904) suggests. The daughter of an influential Algerian Sufi educational reformer, Laila fought not just the suspicions of the French colonial regime about the educational activities of her father's Sufi Lodge,) but also her cousin's attempts to wrest succession to her father's work and holdings. While this was a classic case of native women facing the collaboration of indigenous and colonial patriarchies, Laila mobilized both Muslim dignitaries and reform-hiinded French administrators in her struggle to preserve her own power and to fortify, literally and figuratively, her father's spiritual work. But in Africa as elsewhere, the determination of imperial powers to extend their territorial influence and reach was also often itself a defensive reaction. Colonial encroachments and frontier wars sometimes arose from anxieties produced by an encounter with I. "indigenous grammars of power and authority" in addition to a more basic hun- 1 ger for land and resources.187 There is not, in other words, a facile or easily generalizable formula of cause and ; effect when it comes to historicizing anti-imperial episodes, which might range i from the killing of an English magistrate (like the murder of Hamilton Hope by the Mpondomise chief Mhlontlo at Sulenkama in South Africa in 1880) to an out-and-out revolution of the kind led against the Spanish and then the United States I " in the Philippines by Emilio Aguinaldo from 1896. Captured by the United States in 1901, Aguinaldo recognized US sovereignty in the Philippines, in contrast with some of his countrymen who continued to resist the occupation. Nor were antico-lonial agents circumscribed by the territorial limits of those empires to which they were subject. This was particularly clear in the earlier career of the great Filipino polymath and novelist Jose Rizal, who undertook medical training in Madrid, Paris, and Heidelberg, mixed with leading ethnologists in Berlin, traveled widely in Europe, Japan, and the United States, and lived in Hong Kong before returning to the Philippines, where he was a leading social reformer and advocate of independence until he died in i89